Plants in Science Fiction
Page 19
Nevertheless, plant blindness or the ‘defoliation of the cultural imagination’5 has defined (and continues to define) modern science and philosophy. Such blindness is ‘accountable for the current state of vegetal disregard and hence environmental catastrophe’,6 despite research that explores how ‘plants fight for territory, seek out food, evade predators and trap prey. They are alive as any animal, and – like animals – they exhibit behaviour.’7 Plant blindness is therefore a remarkable oversight, especially considering that plants are instrumental for all life on Earth and ‘can function perfectly well as poster children for an ironically organicist posthumanism’.8 Contemporary research into plant studies suggests that interrogations of the vegetal have become a blooming enterprise expanding posthumanist inquiries into perhaps unexpected venues; these inquiries are well suited to illumination through sf’s imaginative and extrapolative worldbuilding techniques.
Kathleen Ann Goonan’s award-nominated Queen City Jazz – the first novel of the Nanotech Quartet that also includes Mississippi Blues, Crescent City Rhapsody and Light Music – is ideally suited to pursue a refoliation of our cultural imagination: it features a futuristic Cincinnati changed into a nanotechnologically enlivened Flower City with infopollination carried out by mutated Bees and a protagonist defined by her vegetal–animal–posthuman origins. Queen City Jazz therefore addresses both the question of the vegetal – an examination that aims to dispel plant blindness and make visible the vegetable kingdom’s ‘uncanny ontological potency’9 – and the question of the animal, which Jacques Derrida describes as a critical interrogation into practices that deprioritise ‘all living things that man does not recognize as his fellows, his neighbors, or his brothers’.10 In its depiction of posthuman characters navigating a radically transformed Cincinnati, Queen City Jazz’s questioning of the vegetal and the animal observes not species hierarchy but, instead, a vegetal-animal-(post)human species reciprocity that offers promising ways to imagine a post-anthropocentric post-humanism that is vital for the challenges of the twenty-first century.
Over the course of Queen City Jazz and Mississippi Blues, Verity gradually learns the mysterious history of her nanotechnological world. After a decade of nanotechnological infancy, the First Nanotech Wave led to the limited adoption of self-replication technologies; however, a series of mysterious and unpredictable pulses helped trigger the Second Nanotech Wave when ‘radio failed, washed out more and more often by a puzzling source sometimes rumored to be a previous hidden quasar’.11 These mysterious pulses (given full explanation in Light Music) proved crippling for telecommunications networks, so genetic engineering and nanotechnology were looked upon as the most viable reparative solutions. These new networks lay the roots for the Flower Cities ‘where it was not only possible but supremely sensible to integrate biology’s speed, intensity, and precision into cities, making every Flower City almost a single biological entity’.12 Unfortunately, the Information Wars quickly followed the Second Nanotech Wave as cities were vulnerable to nanotech terrorists, prompting scientists to devise advanced nanotechnological defences which in turn escaped their petri dishes and containment chambers; as a result, ‘[p]lagues of thought – viruslike, airborne informational nan – released during the Information Wars were so compelling that those unwilling to be drawn into the strangeness could only isolate themselves and hope for favorable winds.’13 To add insult to injury, earthquakes helped usher forth the Third Nanotech Wave as vast nanotechnological networks collapsed and plunged the Flower Cities into relative isolation: nanotechnology became increasingly demonised, airborne plagues continued to threaten anyone within breathing distance, and global populations declined precipitously.
This is Verity’s fractured world at the start of Queen City Jazz and although Cincinnati is bizarre, dangerous and strangely enticing Verity enters the Flower City to find the nanotechnology she needs to save the lives of her friend Blaze and her dog Cairo after they’ve been critically shot. Over the course of her interactions with the Queen City’s inhabitants and the Flower City itself, Verity learns that the foundations for the Flower Cities include the transformation of pheromones into metapheromones; in other words, ‘[p]heromones, used by many living creatures for precise communication, were studied in great detail, isolated, and combined like an entirely new alphabet into metapheromones.’14 Not surprisingly and out of necessity, it quickly followed that ‘the human body itself could be modified to receive and transmit precise information … [and] people within the cities could choose to purchase biomodifications from developers. With these receptors, transformed humans could use metapheromones to communicate virtually any information swiftly, fully, and precisely.’15 Of course, those who refused to undergo the biomodifications were left behind in this brave new world (or actively fought against it) and have been forced to eke out whatever existence is available to them.
While Verity navigates Cincinnati, she discovers that the Flower Cities were in part an attempt to materialise utopia. Abe Durancy, the Queen City’s chief architect and Verity’s ‘relative’,16 initially envisioned nanotechnology reshaping and recreating matter, ‘bring[ing] relief from the age-old problems of food, clothing, and shelter. There would at last be time for people to develop their creative energies. Their individuality.’17 The Queen City was imagined as part of a vast utopian network, a sentiment mirrored by key characters in Queen City Jazz. For example, Azure, a friend Verity makes while she is in Cincinnati, extols the health benefits and immortality the Queen City lovingly promises its residents. Even Verity eventually comes to appreciate and understand the utopian possibilities of Durancy’s Flower City: ‘And wasn’t this what it was supposed to be like, after all? … A City where one did not have to labor for food, clothing, and shelter. A City where humanity’s promise could finally unfurl.’18 As Susan V. H. Castro puts it, ‘[t]he Flower Cities would be our ultimate tool: self-sustaining, self-healing solar-powered complex living beings that do for us whatever we do not wish to do for ourselves.’19
The Flower City’s integration of the vegetal with the technological is foundational to how Cincinnati (in)operates, and this integration suffuses Queen City Jazz, at the very least on the symbolic level. For example, while still living in Shaker Hill, Verity learns that the ‘tiny [nanotechnological] assemblers are light as seeds’;20 later, an infected Blaze explains to Verity that Cincinnati holds ‘the seeds for an infinite number of bridges, with designs that stunned the heart and eyes … “All of civilization lies buried there,” he’d said towards the end, eyes flashing, as if he himself wanted to go and activate the seeds.’21 Finally, Verity learns Blaze is right: Cincinnati’s buildings ‘had been created – grown from seeds as Blaze always claimed’.22 In addition, the Queen City’s techno-organic communications network is ‘modeled on mycelium’23 which, as Nic Fleming reports for BBC Earth, has proven instrumental for plants to communicate with one another. Fleming writes about ongoing research that shows evidence of a mycelium-based network that not only allows carbon transfer between Douglas fir and paper birch trees or nitrogen and phosphorus exchange among plants, but also functions as an early warning system; namely, ‘when plants are attacked by harmful fungi, they release chemical signals into the mycelia that warn their neighbours’, while tomato plants and broad beans have been observed to ‘use fungal networks to pick up on impending threats’, including blight and hungry aphids.24 The organic network in Queen City Jazz is therefore an extension of nature’s mycelium networks which, in conjunction with the seed imagery, helps disrupt plant blindness that is central to the question of the vegetal.
The question of the vegetal, however, doesn’t operate in isolation. Goonan’s Queen City can only function through a complex reciprocity that involves mutated Bees harvesting the information-turned-pollen seeded in the Flowers and then carrying that pollen-information from Flower to Flower where it can then be accessed by Cincinnati’s posthuman citizens. Verity learns that ‘nanotechnologists quickly realized that large g
enetically engineered Bees(tm) were far superior to the prototype cyborgs which originally collected information and disseminated it throughout the cities, particularly when implanted with limbic tissue, which gave them an emotional imperative to deal in human information’.25 As a result, these Bees flying throughout the air can ‘transmit a new dimension of information dense and individual and vital to the essence of human communication … that which cannot be reduced to binary operations – at least not in any reasonable sort of human time frame’.26 Much like the mycelium networks, this entire communicative process is also drawn from the natural world because flowers ‘are semantic in their being – they have evolved with the explicit purpose of sending messages to mammals, birds, insects and other animals that pollinate them and disperse their seeds’.27 In other words, the Queen City’s symbiotic functioning of the Flowers and the Bees, nano-technological extrapolations of our own flowers and bees, reinforces the question of the vegetal and the question of the animal as fundamentally the same question because vegetal and animal are part of a larger organic network that relies upon species reciprocity, an interdependency central to the natural world.
Just as the question of the vegetal disrupts plant blindness, so too does the question of the animal operate in a disruptive fashion regarding the human–animal species hierarchy; namely, Queen City Jazz’s narrative resolution can only occur when Verity uses her nanotechnological implants to tap into her (nonhuman) animal potential that has been foreshadowed since the first page of the novel. For example, Verity possesses a telepathic link with her dog Cairo, and they can communicate with one another in a decidedly non-verbal fashion. She also has what is later revealed to be Bee-vision as she looks around at her Shaker Hill community and sees colourful auras surrounding some of her neighbours. This Bee-vision is only the first step of a transformation that finds Verity occupying Bee bodies with increased frequency. Verity initially resists being a Bee, fighting ‘against the impersonal expansion, [struggling] against the pull of brilliant colour and seductive scene, which were only a cruel disguise for eliciting complete obedience’.28 As she further occupies Bee bodies, however, Verity ‘sucked forth stories, stories, stories, they fell off the stamens that weren’t stamens and stuck to her legs and she pushed them into pockets and stored them there laughing, in her dreams, in the beautiful and perfect greed of this glorious sucking up of pure experience’.29 This moment of Verity feeding off the Flower’s techno-stamens again highlights how there exists a species reciprocity that inextricably links flowers and bees (or Flowers and Bees) and, by extension, the transformed posthumans living within Goonan’s enlivened future. Collectively this reciprocity further disrupts any ontologies predicated on species hierarchies or the ‘reductive categories we use as shorthand to constrain the complexity of the world into units that can be grasped by rational thought’.30
The stories Verity-as-Bee sucks forth from the Flower’s techno-stamens, however, are actually part of the problem afflicting the Queen City and its inhabitants. As Castro writes, the most basic organising principle of the novel is ‘the metaphysical premise that everything is information’.31 By extension, everything can also be stored as information. This is evident in the translation of Cincinnatians into computer data where they are uploaded into Cincinnati’s complex storage banks during the winter months and then re-awakened in the springtime, some of them in the form of such famous personas as Allen Ginsberg, Scott Joplin, Ella Fitzgerald, Shirley Temple and even George Herriman’s character Krazy Kat (just to name a few). Given its vast storage capabilities, seemingly immeasurable power to upload and download Cincinnatians, and ability to recreate and rearrange matter, the utopian Flower City is nothing less than a vast archive, but Verity witnesses the corruptions at the utopian archive’s core. For example, ‘[t]he Bees have become addicted to the metapheromonal byproducts of human emotion, and very specific combinations at that. Stories. Music. Art. That’s why they cause the same things to be relived – recycled.’32 In other words, the archived citizens are trapped in looping narratives tied to the characters they embody when they are retrieved from storage every spring and filed away with winter’s approach, a perpetual loop that feeds the Bees’ addiction.
In addition to Cincinnati’s problem with Bee addiction, the City itself proves problematic: nanotechnology may repeatedly be likened to seeds throughout the novel, but the Queen City is fashioned after a seed bank. Explaining the profound disconnect between seeds and seed banks, Tom Bristow quotes extensively from Michael Marder’s conference paper ‘The Sense of Seeds or Seminal Events’ that he delivered in 2014 at the Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture. In that paper, Marder (as Bristow explains it) describes the seed as an ‘“event”, something abrupt and unexpected (like birth or death)’.33 Marder goes on to note in the conference paper that one of the qualities of seeds as part of a larger vegetal process is ‘exception or outtake, the freedom from rigid determination, which extracts the seed from the closed circuit of potentiality and actuality, committing it to chance’.34 In other words,
seeds’ unexpected and open-ended possibilities and exceptionality do not fit so easily into the ‘techno-capitalist framing of vegetal life,’ which the processes of seed patenting and the production of sterile seeds epitomise. Such framing takes away from the reproductive potential of seeds. In Marder’s language, instrumentalism (or banking seeds for a return on investment) ‘de-eventalizes’ seeds and ‘robs them of their evental character’.35
If, as Marder explains it, the seed is an ‘event’, described above as something that is abrupt and unexpected, then the instrumentalism or ‘de-eventalization’ of seed banks – i.e., stripping the unexpected from the seed itself and subjecting it to rigid determination – is mirrored in Cincinnati stripping its stored citizens of their evental character and reducing them to nothing more than simulacra of simulacra (i.e., the fictional characters they embody); as a result, ‘[n]one of these people seemed very happy. They all wanted something. They were still partly human. They wanted themselves, that was all. They just wanted themselves.’36 While Azure may extol the utopian virtues of immortality within the archival seed bank, a woman named Jane offers a stark contrast when she tells Verity that ‘[e]verything is so – I mean, it’s not like it was meant to be, I’m sure of it, but I can’t quite put my finger on what’s wrong’.37 Finally, a recently thawed Cincinnatian discovers he is now Hazel Motes from Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood but can’t parse the motives behind the actions he merely replicates from O’Connor’s novel. In sum, while seeds ‘are open to chance: where and how they fall, as well as soil and climate conditions’,38 Goonan’s Flower City dramatises how seed banks forestall the exception or outtake quality of seeds altogether. This seed bank ‘de-eventalises’ any utopian potential that may have existed at the root of the Flower City and entrenches a dystopian instrumentalism at the heart of this archive.
The problems with the Queen City are rooted in Abe Durancy’s de-eventalising of utopia: ‘[H]e could have left his vision open, as an empowering indeterminate idea of personal freedom, but instead’, as Castro argues, ‘he gave it a determinate form by imposing his own substantive conception of the good.’39 As a result, Dennis Durancy, another of Verity’s ‘relatives’, explains that ‘[i]t’s all so tightly woven. Everything just repeats and repeats. The loop is endless. There’s no escape. There never will be.’40 In other words, if Claire Preston is correct that ‘[t]he health of ecosystems can be judged partly by the health of bees’,41 then Goonan’s Cincinnati is devastatingly ill as Verity realises that the Bees’ addictions42 mean Cincinnati’s citizens ‘were doomed to go on repeating these stories to please those monstrous Bees’.43 This ‘monstrous Bees’ comment, coupled with Verity’s initial resistance to becoming-Bee, partakes of a common association between dystopias and insect hives. Juan Antonio Ramírez, for example, points out that despite an architectural wonder sometimes associated with hive imagery, negative ideas about h
ives have been proliferating since the years immediately following World War II: ‘The defeat of the fascist powers saw an attenuation of the “positive” connotations associated with social insects, and very few people have dared to advocate the resurrection of the beehive as a symbol of political activity.’44 As a result, conflating images of tyrannical control or loss of agency to an insect hive is perhaps one of the easiest signals of dystopia precisely because modern audiences routinely encounter the hive as nothing but a nightmarish setting that robs the individual of autonomy and demands of its inhabitants nothing but blind obedience. Thus, when Azure begrudgingly admits to Verity that ‘[w]e do not question the desires of the Holy Queen’ and ‘[w]e all feed Her in our own way’,45 there is no positive utopian celebration in this revelation, as the loss of individuality and subservience to the (insect) Hive and its Queen Bee is always already coded into dystopia. In the end, the intended utopian goals of the archive were conceptually flawed from its inception – i.e. Abe Durancy’s top–down managerial approach to fashioning utopia easily leading to a dystopia – and the archive is increasingly (mal)functioning on the vegetal and animal levels simultaneously: all techno-biological matter within the Flower City, including Flowers, Bees and Cincinnatians, has lost any evental possibility and operates solely on the level of instrumentalism.
The question of the vegetal and animal are therefore not separate questions but, rather, shared critical inquiries whose potency in Goonan’s novel also opens a line of inquiry into a third question: the question of the archive. As I’ve argued elsewhere,46 the archive has resonated with utopian sensibilities and desired outcomes since at least the nineteenth century when the British empire methodically amassed and produced information on a previously unmatched level: ‘They surveyed and they mapped’, Thomas Richards writes in The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. ‘They took census, produced statistics …Then they shoved the data they had collected into a shifting series of classifications.’47 As a result, archives came to embody a unified field of information ‘located explicitly in the register of representation, where, most successfully of all, the archive often took the imagined form of a utopian state’.48 The archive was therefore envisioned as the ‘sum total of the known and knowable … that once seemed an attainable goal hovering on the horizon of possibility’, a goal that ‘became and has remained utopia’.49 The utopian goal of archivisation – i.e., the sum total of the known and knowable – has only accelerated as archivisation remains a profitable industry, evident in how thoroughly ubiquitous and detailed such industries as data storage, analytics and genetic mapping have become in the last two decades.