Haraway, Donna J., Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Free Association Books, 1991).
Haraway, Donna J., Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2016).
Houle, Karen L. F., ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics as Extension or Becoming?’, Journal for Critical Animal Studies, 9/1–2 (2011), 89–116.
Iovino, Serenella and Serpil Oppermann (eds), Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014).
Irigaray, Luce and Michael Marder, Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
Karban, Richard, Plant Sensing and Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015).
Keetley, Dawn and Angela Tenga (eds), Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Literature and Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Laist, Randy, ‘Introduction’, in Randy Laist (ed.), Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2013), pp. 9–17.
Mancuso, Stefano and Alessandra Viola, Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence, trans. Joan Benham (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2015).
Marder, Michael, Grafts: Writings on Plants (Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2016).
Marder, Michael, The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014).
Marder, Michael, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).
Miller, Elaine P., The Vegetative Soul: From Philosophy of Nature to Subjectivity in the Feminine (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).
Miller, T. S., ‘Lives of the Monster Plants: The Revenge of the Vegetable in the Age of Animal Studies’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 23/3 (2012), 460–79.
Mortimer-Sandilands, Catriona and Bruce Erickson (eds), Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010).
Morton, Timothy, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013).
Nealon, Jeffrey T., Plant Theory: Biopower and Vegetable Life (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015).
Pollan, Michael, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (London: Bloomsbury, 2001).
Plumwood, Val, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London: Routledge, 2002).
Robertson, Benjamin J., None of This is Normal: The Fiction of Jeff VanderMeer (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018).
Trewavas, Anthony, Plant Behaviour and Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Tsing, Anna L., The Mushroom at the End of the World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015).
Vieira, Patrícia, Monica Gagliano and John Ryan (eds), The Green Thread: Dialogues with the Vegetal World (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016).
Vint, Sherryl, Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2010).
Wandersee, James H. and Elisabeth E. Schussler, ‘Toward a Theory of Plant Blindness’, Plant Science Bulletin, 47/1 (2001), pp. 2–9.
Notes
Introduction
1. From the foreword to ‘Vaster than Empires and More Slow’, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Wind’s Twelve Quarters and The Compass Rose (1971) (London: Gollancz, 2015), pp. 167–201, p. 167.
2. Following a common convention in science fiction scholarship, the phrase ‘science fiction’ will be abbreviated as ‘sf’ throughout this introduction.
3. Interested scholars would do well to peruse T. S. Miller’s contribution to this volume as well as his botanical fiction timeline and database, which can be found on his website, http://www.fishinprison.com (last accessed 9 May 2019).
4. Francis Hallé, In Praise of Plants (1999) (Portland, or Cambridge: Timber Press, 2002), p. 37 and Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 2.
5. James H. Wandersee and Elisabeth E. Schussler, ‘Toward a Theory of Plant Blindness’, Plant Science Bulletin, 47/1 (2001), 2–9.
6. Robert Hass, ‘The Problem of Describing Trees,’ The New Yorker, 19 June 2005, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2005/06/27/the-problem-of-describing-trees (last accessed 15 November 2018).
7. Darko Suvin, ‘On the Poetics of the Science Fiction Genre’, College English, 34/3 (1972), 372–82, p. 375.
8. Given the movement towards plant studies, as gestured to above, it should be unsurprising that a cluster of plant studies and literature/media-related volumes, too, have emerged in recent years. From the wider reach of ecocriticism in Eric C. Otto’s Green Speculations: Science Fiction and Transformative Environmentalism (Colombus: Ohio State University Press, 2012) and Chris Pak’s Terraforming: Ecopolitical Transformations and Environmentalism in Science Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2016) to the narrower consideration of arboreal inroads in eighteenth-century culture in Invaluable Trees: Cultures of Nature 1660–1830 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2012), edited by Laura Auricchio, Elizabeth Heckendorn Cook and Giulia Pacini, and of science and literature in Lara Karpenko’s and Shalyn Claggett’s edited volume Strange Science: Investigating the Limits of Knowledge in the Victorian Age (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), the impact of plants on and in culture, history and the arts is gaining traction.
1. Weird Flora: Plant Life in the Classic Weird Tale
1. S. T. Joshi, The Weird Tale (Holicong, PA: Wildside, 1990), p. 1.
2. John Rieder, ‘On Defining SF, or Not: Genre Theory, SF, and History’, Science Fiction Studies, 37/2 (2010), 191–209, p. 193.
3. Amy J. Devitt, ‘Integrating Rhetorical and Literary Theories of Genre’, College English, 62/6 (2000), 696–718, p. 699.
4. H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature (New York: Dover, 1973), p. 15.
5. Roger Luckhurst, ‘The Weird: A Dis/orientation’, Textual Practice, 31 (2017), 1041–61. p. 1042.
6. Veronica Hollinger, ‘Genre vs. Mode’, in Rob Latham (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Science Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 139–51, p. 140.
7. Luckhurst, ‘The Weird’, 1045.
8. Hollinger, ‘Genre vs. Mode’, p. 140.
9. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature, p. 15.
10. Mark Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie (London: Repeater, 2016), p. 15.
11. Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, p. 13.
12. Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie, p. 10.
13. Dawn Keetley, ‘Introduction: Six Theses on Plant Horror; or, Why are Plants Horrifying?’, in Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga (eds), Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Literature and Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 1–30, p. 6.
14. Keetley, ‘Six Theses’, p. 6.
15. Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 20.
16. Graham Harman, Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy (Winchester: Zero, 2012), p. 51.
17. Algernon Blackwood, ‘The Willows’, in S. T. Joshi (ed.), Ancient Sorceries and Other Weird Stories (London: Penguin, 2002), pp. 17–62, p. 17.
18. Anthony Camara, ‘Nature Unbound: Cosmic Horror in Algernon Blackwood’s ‘The Willows’’, Horror Studies, 4/1 (2013), 43–62, p. 44.
19. Camara, ‘Nature Unbound’, 45.
20. Camara, ‘Nature Unbound’, 56.
21. Camara, ‘Nature Unbound’, 44.
22. Blackwood, ‘The Willows’, pp. 17–18.
23. Blackwood, ‘The Willows’, p. 18.
24. Blackwood, ‘The Willows’, p. 24.
25. Blackwood, ‘The Willows’, p. 28.
26. Blackwood, ‘The Willows’, p. 23.
27. Blackwood, ‘The Willows’, p. 29.
28. Blackwood, ‘The Willows’, p. 23.
29. Blackwo
od, ‘The Willows’, p. 22.
30. Blackwood, ‘The Willows’, p. 36.
31. Blackwood, ‘The Willows’, p. 29.
32. Val Plumwood, ‘Being Prey’, in David Rothenberg and Marta Ulvaeus (eds), The New Earth Reader: The Best of Terra Nova (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), pp. 79–91, p. 89.
33. Marder, Plant-Thinking, p. 3.
34. Marder, Plant-Thinking, p. 9.
35. Val Plumwood, Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason (London: Routledge, 2002), p. 4.
36. Plumwood, ‘Being Prey’, p. 88.
37. Eugene Thacker, In the Dust of This Planet (Winchester: Zero, 2011), p. 2.
38. Thacker, In the Dust, p. 5.
39. Thacker, In the Dust, pp. 5–7.
40. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (ed.), Monster Theory: Reading Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), pp. 3–25, p. 6.
41. Cohen, ‘Monster Culture’, p. 9.
42. Keetley, ‘Six Theses’, pp. 18–19.
43. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, ‘Lovecraft’s Things’, in Sederholm and Weinstock, The Age of Lovecraft, pp. 62–78, p. 69.
44. Weinstock, ‘Lovecraft’s Things’, p. 69.
45. Weinstock, ‘Lovecraft’s Things’, p. 65.
46. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (London: Duke University Press, 2010), p. ix.
47. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 4.
48. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 11.
49. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 11.
50. Randy Laist, ‘Introduction’, in Randy Laist (ed.), Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies (New York: Rodopi, 2013), pp. 9–17, pp. 9–10.
51. David MacRitchie, The Testimony of Tradition (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner, 1890), pp. 87–8, 100.
52. Arthur Machen, ‘Novel of the Black Seal’, in S. T. Joshi (ed.), The White People and Other Weird Stories (London: Penguin, 2011), pp. 29–66, p. 32.
53. Machen, ‘Black Seal’, p. 31.
54. Machen, ‘Black Seal’, pp. 31–2.
55. Machen, ‘Black Seal’, p. 32.
56. Machen, ‘Black Seal’, p. 33.
57. Machen, ‘Black Seal’, p. 34.
58. Machen, ‘Black Seal’, pp. 38–40.
59. Machen, ‘Black Seal’, p. 54.
60. Machen, ‘Black Seal’, p. 59.
61. Arthur Machen, ‘The White People’, in Joshi, The White People, pp. 111– 47, p. 113.
62. Machen, ‘The White People’, p. 126.
63. Machen, ‘The White People’, p. 119.
64. Machen, ‘The White People’, p. 121.
65. Machen, ‘The White People’, p. 121.
66. Machen, ‘The White People’, p. 122.
67. Machen, ‘The White People’, p. 123.
68. Machen, ‘The White People’, pp. 123–4.
69. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology After the End of the World (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013), p. 100.
70. Machen, ‘The White People’, p. 126.
71. Machen, ‘The White People’, p. 126.
72. Machen, ‘The White People’, p. 127.
73. Machen, ‘The White People’, p. 127.
74. Marder, Plant-Thinking, p. 9.
75. Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari, ‘From the Century of the Pods to the Century of the Plants: Plant Horror, Politics, and Vegetal Ontology’, Discourse, 34/1 (2012), 32–58, p. 36.
76. Matthew Hall, ‘The Sense of the Monster Plant’, in Keetley and Tenga, Plant Horror, 243–55, p. 248.
77. Hall, ‘The Sense of the Monster Plant’, p. 249.
78. T. S. Miller, ‘Lives of the Monster Plants: The Revenge of the Vegetable in the Age of Animal Studies’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 23/3 (2012), 460–79, p. 462.
79. Miller, ‘Lives of the Monster Plants’, 462–4.
80. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘The Lurking Fear’, in S. T. Joshi (ed.), The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories (London: Penguin, 2005), pp. 62–81, p. 81.
81. Lovecraft, ‘The Lurking Fear’, pp. 62–3.
82. Lovecraft, ‘The Lurking Fear’, pp. 66–7.
83. Lovecraft, ‘The Lurking Fear’, p. 72.
84. Lovecraft, ‘The Lurking Fear’, p. 68.
85. Lovecraft, ‘The Lurking Fear’, pp. 69–70.
86. Lovecraft, ‘The Lurking Fear’, p. 68.
87. Lovecraft, ‘The Lurking Fear’, p. 72.
88. H. P. Lovecraft, ‘At the Mountains of Madness’, in S. T. Joshi (ed.), The Thing on the Doorstep and Other Weird Stories (London: Penguin, 2001), pp. 246–340, pp. 262–5.
89. Lovecraft, ‘At the Mountains of Madness’, pp. 263–5.
90. Lovecraft, ‘At the Mountains of Madness’, p. 330.
91. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, p. 13.
92. Karen L. F. Houle, ‘Animal, Vegetable, Mineral: Ethics as Extension or Becoming?’, Journal for Critical Animal Studies, 9/1–2 (2011), 89–116, p. 111.
93. Algernon Blackwood, ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’, in Joshi, Ancient Sorceries, pp. 211–74, p. 255.
94. Blackwood, ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’, p. 215.
95. Blackwood, ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’, pp. 215–16.
96. Blackwood, ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’, p. 222.
97. Blackwood, ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’, p. 254.
98. Blackwood, ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’, p. 255.
99. Blackwood, ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’, p. 212.
100. Blackwood, ‘The Man Whom the Trees Loved’, p. 273.
2. ‘Bloody unnatural brutes’: Anthropomorphism, Colonialism and the Return of the Repressed in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids
1. John Wyndham was the most famous pen name of John Wyndham Parkes Lucas Beynon Harris (1903–69). For clarity, the essay uses the name ‘John Wyndham’ throughout, even though his usual name was ‘John Beynon Harris’ (and he was known to his friends as ‘Jack Harris’).
2. Dawn Keetley, ‘Introduction: Six Theses on Plant Horror; or, Why Are Plants Horrifying?’, in Dawn Keetley and Angela Tenga (eds), Plant Horror: Approaches to the Monstrous Vegetal in Fiction and Film (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 1–30, pp. 11–12.
3. Graham J. Matthews, ‘What We Think About When We Think About Triffids: The Monstrous Vegetal in Post-war British Science Fiction’, in Keetley and Tenga, Plant Horror, pp. 111–27, p. 111.
4. Joni Adamson and Catriona Sandilands, ‘Insinuations: Thinking Plant Politics with The Day of the Triffids’, in Monica Gagliano, John C. Ryan and Patrícia Vieira (eds), The Language of Plants: Science, Philosophy, Literature (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2017), pp. 234–52, p. 235.
5. See, for instance, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., ‘Science Fiction and Empire’, Science Fiction Studies, 90 (July 2003), 231–45; Patricia Kerslake, Science Fiction and Empire (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007); John Rieder, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008); Jessica Langer, Postcolonialism and Science Fiction (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).
6. See, for instance, Brian Aldiss, Billion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1973), p. 294; Christopher Priest, ‘British Science Fiction’, in Patrick Parrinder (ed.), Science Fiction: A Critical Guide (London: Longman, 1979), pp. 187–202, p. 195. See also Nicholas Ruddick, Ultimate Island: On the Nature of British Science Fiction (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1993), pp. 99–100.
7. Jerry Määttä, ‘The Politics of Post-Apocalypse: Ideologies on Trial in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids’, in Christian Baron, Peter Nicolai Halvorsen and Christine Cornea (eds), Science Fiction, Ethics and the Human Condition (New York: Springer, 2017), pp. 207–26.
8. Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction (London: Polity, 2005), p. 132.
9. David Ketterer, ‘
The Corrected and Expanded Introduction to PLAN FOR CHAOS by John Wyndham, edited by David Ketterer and Andy Sawyer (Liverpool University Press, 2009)’, HUBbub, 17 November 2009, http://sfhubbub.blogspot.com/2009/11/revised-and-updated-introduction-to. html (last accessed 10 May 2019); David Ketterer, ‘John Wyndham: The Facts of Life Sextet’, in David Seed (ed.), A Companion to Science Fiction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 375–88, p. 377. See also David Ketterer, ‘John Wyndham’s World War III and his abandoned Fury of Creation Trilogy’, in David Seed (ed.), Future Wars: The Anticipations and the Fears (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), pp. 103–29, pp. 107–8.
10. Ketterer, ‘John Wyndham’s World War III’, p. 107; C. N. Manlove, ‘Everything Slipping Away: John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids’, Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 4 (1991), 29–53, p. 33.
11. Andrew Hammond, British Fiction and the Cold War (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 28.
12. Matthews, ‘What We Think About’, pp. 113–18; Gary Farnell, ‘What Do Plants Want?’, in Keetley and Tenga, Plant Horror, pp. 179–96, p. 180; Matthew Hall, ‘The Sense of the Monster Plant’, in Keetley and Tenga, Plant Horror, pp. 243–55, pp. 247–51; Adamson and Sandilands, ‘Insinuations’, pp. 237–9.
13. Julius Kagarlitsky, ‘Wyndham, John’, in Jay P. Pederson (ed.), St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, fourth edn (New York: St. James Press, 1996), pp. 1039–40, p. 1040.
14. Everett F. Bleiler, Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years (Kent: Kent State University Press, 1998), p. 317.
15. Edward James, Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 80.
16. Robert M. Philmus, Visions and Re-Visions: (Re)Constructing Science Fiction (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005), p. 297.
17. Vivian Beynon Harris, ‘[My Brother,] John Wyndham, 1903–1969’, ed. David Ketterer, Foundation: The International Review of Science Fiction, 75 (Spring 1999), 18–35, p. 24.
18. David Ketterer (ed.), ‘Questions and Answers: The Life and Work of John Wyndham’, The New York Review of Science Fiction, 187 (March 2004), 1, 6–10, pp. 7, 10.
19. John Beynon [John Wyndham], ‘Sowing New Thoughts’, Tales of Wonder, 7 (Summer 1939), 124–5.
20. As David Ketterer has noted, the novel also shows influences from other works by H. G. Wells, most notably perhaps In the Days of the Comet (1906) and ‘The Flowering of the Strange Orchid’ (1894) (David Ketterer, ‘The Genesis of the Triffids’, The New York Review of Science Fiction, 187 (March 2004), 11–14, p. 13; David Ketterer, Trouble With Triffids: The Life and Fiction of John Wyndham (forthcoming), chapter 8).
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