Plants in Science Fiction

by Katherine E. Bishop

  Scientists disagree on whether insects or flowers evolved first, or if they evolved together, but it is clear that it took a long time for a new order of plants, called angiosperms, to appear … The flowering angiosperms have branched into thousands of brilliantly different varieties that have constantly adapted to new insects and new situations. While this was happening, some flying insects … specialized, growing such features … to match those of plants suited to them. When these insects feed at flowers they have no idea of the sexual favors they’re performing for the plant, but the codependency is so complete that neither can live without the other.70

  The Caron tulips have already deviated from these norms by being permanently in bloom: ‘There was a logic to plant fertilization; a permanent bloom deviated from that logic as completely as human behaviour on earth deviated from the logic of the reproductive patterns of other animals.’71 For the time being, the Caron tulips, which had precociously developed into entirely heterosexual entities (‘males mixed with females’), appeared still to be reliant on an intermediary for pollination. This fosters the confidently anthropocentric conjecture that ‘it might be possible to train the tulips to pollinate directly – stamen to oviduct’.72 Of course, humans have been hybridising plants for centuries, but the humans have always been in control and, ostensibly, appropriately detached. The complication of species overlap, ‘the plants were little animals [with] animal instincts’, and the manner in which plants begin to take charge of their own destinies, rebelling against and manipulating and eventually hybridising humans, is satirically instructive.73 The frigidity of Freda and the effete courteousness of Paul are exploited by the orchids so that, as co-opted pollinators, they also become co-dependent in terms of their own delayed sexual gratification. When Freda gives birth to her hybridised offspring, it has the characteristics of both an orchid seed and of a human. She and Paul have been able at last, on Flora, to consummate their own relationship, and with the ‘swinging’ orchids, establish a ‘sanatorium’ for the earth-alienated, a new Eden with few rules and where the polymorphous is never labelled perverse.74

  The orchids’ tentacles are indispensable to the seduction of Freda and Paul. Here the tentacle becomes hyper-erotic. It is variously penetrative and all-embracing; it cannot be assigned a strict or static sexual characteristic or function, nor is it uniquely vegetal. Previously the orchid pollinators comprised ‘a tusked mammal as large as a peccary, probably with the tongue of an aardvark’, but the orchids violently turn against them: ‘there was no true animal-plant symbiosis, but an ecological cold war.’75 The new pollinators are human-animals, Paul and Freda. Freda has sex with a ‘prince’ with a ‘pollen-engorged stamen’ and she also has sex with the female orchid, Susy – ‘the third leg of a three-legged stool’, thereby being the pollinating intermediary.76 Paul is seduced, too, responding to the orchids ‘with the longing of a lovesick adolescent’: ‘sometimes the wind blows a tendril across my face in a certain way, and I am intrigued by the thought that they are capable of loving me.’77 These tentacles are used as weapons if necessary, in a manner recognisably triffid-like: ‘the males can tear chunks of flesh from a body with their suction leaves’ but they are also instrumental to the seduction of the human pollinators, both male and female, and the complex amorous relationships that ensue.78 In a passage that might readily be called ‘tentacle porn’, or as Jim Endersby notes, ‘what may be the first (possibly the only) explicit scene of lesbian sex with an orchid’,79 Freda succumbs to a hitherto unknown and mutual ecstasy:

  Now all tendrils were coming into play, fluttering along her thighs and encircling her hips. She lifted her arms to give the vines more freedom with her torso. They enwreathed her, the lower tendrils sliding between her thighs … She was flung into a vortex of exquisite agony and searing rapture. Around her the tendrils shivered in joy and release, and she answered thrust with throb.80

  Paul, having watched, tells Freda: ‘your act back there was a mirror image of your own desires, desires you repressed for no good reason‘, and explains that the sensitive, desiring orchids have chosen them as ‘the ideal animal for their purpose’: ‘We are the pollinators of Eden.’81 However, this is Flora, not Eden. In the foreword to the novel, John Boyd wrote: ‘I loved the paradox in the title The Pollinators of Eden. Logically there could have been no pollinators in Eden. Once Adam and Eve discovered the process of reproduction, there was no longer an Eden. They were ejected for their “sin.”’82 The garden of Flora is Eden’s counterpoint: a garden of perpetual delights from which no one is cast out. ‘The various strands of the sixties counterculture’, writes Jim Endersby, ‘provided the context for the most unexpected and remarkable novel to explore the impact of the botanists’ discovery of pseudocopulation.’83 The future that Freda the cystologist (and mother of a reddish-mahogany seed with blond hair) looks forward to is the development of human-orchid seeds, a model of selective hybridity and an example of the scientific practice of DNA splicing (such as CRSPR/Cas9 technology) that is now, in the twenty-first century, entirely feasible.

  Hybridisation in botany has, once understood, been of tremendous value and encouraged, for variety, resilience and, indeed, beauty. This has not always been true in relation to human hybridity, where miscegenation taboos, formal or informal, racial, religious or cultural, have often prevailed and would be particularly topical in relation to the civil rights movement in 1960s America.

  The Fall of Anthropocentrism

  The use of the botanical tentacle in fiction has been somewhat limited, although not without precedent, as discussed earlier. The nineteenth century saw a rise in tales of botanical horrors set primarily in the vine-entangled, newly explored by colonial expansion but largely imagined dense tropical forests. The tropics become a trope in the tales of strangulating vines or carnivorous plants. It is telling that even on the planet Flora, it is to the island of Tropica that Paul and Freda go to live their lives in extraordinary liaison with orchids. In each of the tales discussed here, the ubiquitous presupposition that plants are ‘just plants’ is satirised. Each of the books has its common-sense and its scientific nay-sayers: ‘stop personifying plants’, Freda warns Hal, until his theory that ‘these tulips are intelligent’ is borne out, just as Bill Masen insists that triffids ‘can’t hear’ while his colleague understands that they hear, and not just each other. In At the Mountains of Madness, the scientists find it impossible to identify the tentacled Elder Ones as either animal or vegetable, sharing as they do significant traits of each kind. The tentacles in The Pollinators of Eden are copulatory (or pseudo-copulatory) but the word copula, meaning ‘bridge’, is an apt term in relation to these texts of hybridity, feared or otherwise. Rather than being identifiable as an organ or appendage with a specific ordained purpose, the tentacle can thus be seen, emblematically, more as a bridge and conjoiner than an evolutionary advantage. It signifies instead the non-teleological and sympoietic features that are anathema to the power plays of the Capitalocene. Tentacles come to stand for the alien-familiar, not just the extraterrestrial (which has its own reassurances for being so speculative) but on this planet, chthonic and much closer to home. The fears (and sometimes consolations) engendered by the monstrous hybridity of the tentacled plants as they appear in these twentieth-century texts are emblematic of other troubled times, respectively: postcolonial migration, the Cold War and civil rights. Correlatively, we have as follows: Lovecraft’s racism and a dramatisation of his terror, not just of an influx of so-called lower orders, but of the severe limitations of any supposed superiority (postcolonial migration); Wyndham’s recognition that the various experiments conducted under the auspices of supernational competition (winning) in war and peace could result in unexpected infiltrations, unforeseen mutations and catastrophic contaminations (the Cold War), and Boyd’s prescience about the implications of deposing the so-called certainties and superiorities of self-privileged European humans, especially male (civil rights). The central role of science in relati
on to each, with its so-called objectivism and empirical certainties but also its accidents and limitations, renders these three texts an instructive triad. Written by three (frightened) men at the height of the Capitalocene, and before the Anthropocene was part of common parlance, these tales of botanical tentacular polymorphism may now be seen to be, like tentacles, feeling their way beyond catastrophe but to a more sympoietic, co-creative, reciprocal relation to the other(s).

  As already noted, neither Haraway nor Miéville turn their attention to botany per se, but each is attuned to the radical potential of the Chthulucene and the Weird. As long ago as 1997, Haraway stated that she was especially drawn to ‘new beings’ such as ‘the tomato with a gene from the … flounder’ and the ‘potato with a gene from the silk moth’ and that to respond otherwise had connotations of ‘racism’ and the rejection of miscegenation.84 These cyborg or hybrid entities are not now the far-fetched stuff of fiction. Both Miéville and Haraway, albeit in their different ways, are clear about the politics of ‘the tentacular’. Although China Miéville stated that his intention in writing novels is not to ‘make political points’, but rather that he simply ‘passionately loves monsters’,85 there is no doubt that his radical commitment is anti-capitalistic and to a ‘politics of generic discontinuity’.86 What constitutes the monstrous, or transgressive or abject is political – and ‘personal’ to more than human subjects. More pertinent, then, is the term ‘cosmopolitical’, a concept first proposed by Isabelle Stengers in 1996, and later championed by Haraway.87 The cosmos referred to in this regard is not the anthropocentric conception with which humans are most familiar but rather ‘the unknown, constituted by these multiple, divergent worlds, and … the articulations of which they could eventually be capable’.88 In terms of the modes of tentacular telling (remembering Haraway’s ‘myriad tentacles will be needed to tell the story of the Chthulucene’, cited earlier), China Miéville highlights the slipperiness of categorisation in genre fiction and explains why ‘Weird Fiction’ is more comprehensively and appropriately meaningful, particularly at this time of ‘trouble’.

  I don’t think you can distinguish science fiction, fantasy and horror with any rigour, as the writers around the magazine Weird Tales early in the last century (Lovecraft in particular) illustrated most sharply. So I use the term ‘weird fiction’ for all fantastic literature – fantasy, SF, horror and all the stuff that won’t fit neatly into slots.89

  Thus, ‘the Weird is ‘irreducible’, with its ‘unprecedented forms, and its insistence on a chaotic, amoral, anthropoperipheral universe’ which ‘stresses the implacable alterity of its aesthetics and concerns’.90 Hitherto, have tentacles been deemed lovely? Classical Medusa, a hybrid creature herself (being mortal but born of gods), is significant in this regard; her tentacular hairdo, so presumptuously multi-phallic, so ‘unfeminine’, so ‘unnatural’, froze male onlookers, so the classic tale relates, in horror. Haraway posits: what if Medusa, one of the ‘dreadful chthonic ones’ had been approached differently, more ‘politely’, and less fearfully?91 ‘A Weird tentacle does not “mean” the Phallus’, states Miéville but, more importantly, it simply does not mean any one thing.92 The Phallus, of course, is the singular synecdoche of the patriarchal Symbolic Order, of what Haraway calls Species Man: that ‘great phallic humanising and modernizing Adventure, where man, made in the image of a vanished god, takes on superpowers in his secular-sacred ascent, only to end in tragic detumescence, once again’.93 In Eden, monotheism’s Garden trope and instructive Adventure, a serpent coiled around the Tree, insinuating itself into the mind of Eve, and leading to human exclusion (and yet, elevation), compulsory heterosexuality, species isolation and other intransigent binaries. In the Garden of Eden, plants were provident but passive, and the reptilian villain, singular (and, perhaps, also misunderstood all this time). Tentacles still may seem resonantly serpentine but, given the premises of the Chthulucene, they are no longer affiliated to the lone emblem of Evil, enmity and taboo. Rather, as myriad, botanical tentacles, they are among the signs of a liberating multi-species efflorescence.

  PART 2

  Affinity

  4 Between the Living and the Dead: Vegetal Afterlives in Evgenii Iufit and Vladimir Maslov’s Silver Heads

  Brittany Roberts

  [I]n a peculiar mediation between the living and the dead, caressing the dead with its roots and obtaining nourishment from them, the plant makes them live again. Vegetal afterlife, facilitated by the passage, the procession of the dead (including the decomposing parts of the plants themselves), through the roots to the stem and on to the flower, is a non-mystified and material ‘resurrection’, an opportunity for mortal remains to break free from the darkness of the earth.

  — Michael Marder1

  In Evgenii Iufit and Vladimir Maslov’s ambiguous film Silver Heads [Serebrianye golovy] (1998), which explores the ontological ramifications of human–tree hybridisation, an elite scientist declares: ‘Our experiment is unprecedented: to replace human cells with a synthesis of human and tree molecules. Concrete scientific results aside, this will solve the problem of uniting man and nature and lead to their merging into one ecologically ideal essence [sushchestvo].’2 The scientist (played by co-director Maslov) has been chosen along with several others, the ‘best of the best’, for a prestigious experiment with an ambitious aim: to ‘impart to man the qualities of a tree – its solidity [tverdost’], its unconditionality [bezuslovnost’], its high level of resistance to negative environmental effects – mark[ing] the beginning of the creation of a new human substance, a physiologically more perfect being’. The experiment, however, is unpredictable: though the scientists intend to create a more physiologically perfect human, hybridisation enacts an ontological transformation that diffuses the human across a mixture of human and nonhuman elements, in which differences and contradictions proliferate. Vegetal life, then, is not so easily appropriated; the new human being is no longer recognisably human.

  Silver Heads displays co-director Iufit’s long-standing fascination with the becoming-otherwise of the human. Founder of the St Petersburg-based arts collective Necrorealism, a loosely allied group of artists who explored the interstices between life and death, human and nonhuman, and organic and inorganic in late Soviet ‘parallel’ art, Iufit’s post-Soviet Necrorealist cinema articulates the director’s mature reflections on the co-constitutive relationships among humans, nonhumans and death, and on the possibilities for the becoming-otherwise of Homo sapiens in a technoscientific age. His feature-length science fiction trilogy – Silver Heads (1998, co-written and co-directed by Maslov), Killed by Lightning (2002) and Bipedalism (2005), in which scientists explore new possibilities for human evolution – displays Iufit’s lifelong pursuit of the erasure of the human, or of humans becoming just one of many interconnected, kindred life-forms. Alexei Yurchak describes the beings created in these films as ‘human, semihuman, and hybrid life-forms, all related to each other as a kind of “transgenic” … kinship community that dwells in the zone between life and death, human and animal, sane and insane, in which subjects are no longer regular human beings’.3 These new beings are distanced from the human species; they are ecologically ‘imperceptible’, part of larger ecological flows.

  Given Necrorealism’s investment in the nonhuman transformation of the human, this chapter aims to complement existing scholarship on the sociopolitical, historical and artistic contexts of Necrorealism by considering the movement’s relevance to the ‘nonhuman turn’ in the humanities, particularly the emerging field of critical plant studies. Nonhuman beings abound in Necrorealist cinema and art, especially as they relate to new ontological potentialities and evolutionary paths for the ‘dehumanisation’ of the human. Indeed, Viktor Mazin has argued that Iufit’s ‘central metaphor … is the zooanthropomorph that normal science has identified as a psychopathological reject’.4 However, other nonhuman lives, particularly plants, also proliferate in Necrorealist films, the frames of which – especially
in later, post-Soviet works like Silver Heads – simply burst with vegetal life. This saturating presence of vegetal life in Necrorealist cinema is, I argue, not merely setting – not merely background – but an important, if often overlooked, subject of Necrorealist thought.5

  In this chapter, I consider the relationships between the movement’s interests in death, decomposition, dead bodies and ‘alternative forms of vitality’, including plant life, with regard to these thematics’ potentials for facilitating ecological thought.6 As Ewa Domanska argues in her recent engagement with the ‘forensic turn’ within the humanities, the time has come to rethink the ontological status of the dead body – and this is especially so within the ecological climate of the Anthropocene, in which mass death is occurring on greater and greater scales. Rather than approaching the corpse from a humanistic tradition, which emphasises ‘life’ and ‘death’ as discrete categories and installs boundaries between humans and nonhumans, Domanska, like the Necrorealists, advocates ‘seeing [the corpse] instead as a multispecies form of life and an organic habitat, which in turn leads to questions of what it means to be human in a non-human or post-human (necro)environment’.7 Such calls offer a potent point of entry into Necrorealism, whose numerous liminal, undead, hybrid beings are always marked by multiplicity and nonhuman kinship, which frequently serve as catalysts for their dehumanisation and deterritorialisation into a realm of bare life.

  I also examine Silver Heads alongside cultural contextualisations of Necrorealism, the critical plant studies work of Michael Marder, the posthumanist philosophies of Donna Haraway, Patricia MacCormack and Rosi Braidotti, and the ‘forensic turn’ advocated by Domanska to demonstrate how the film – and Necrorealism itself – presents an attempt to move beyond the anthropocentric limitations of both Soviet Marxist-Leninism and post-Soviet humanism in its pursuit of a ‘life uncontaminated by human consciousness’.8 Specifically, I argue that Silver Heads offers a form of posthumanist ‘plant-thinking’, or a ‘post-metaphysical ontology of vegetal life’, that is resistant to the dualistic and human exceptionalist attitudes towards plants and other nonhumans long exhibited in Western humanist thought, including its Soviet and post-Soviet incarnations.9 Through the film’s depictions of plant–human hybridity, explorations of posthuman vegetised life and ontological investigations into ‘living death’, Silver Heads demonstrates new ways of relating to vegetal life and gestures towards new ontological and ecological possibilities for Homo sapiens.10