Plants in Science Fiction

by Katherine E. Bishop

  21. See ‘trifid, adj. (and n.)’, OED Online, www.oed.com/view/Entry/205960 (last accessed 16 August 2018).

  22. John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (1951) (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2000), p. 31. Subsequent references to this edition of the novel will be given in brackets in the text.

  23. I. F. Clarke, Voices Prophesying War 1763–1984 (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), pp. 94–5.

  24. Peter Fitting, ‘Estranged Invaders: The War of the Worlds’, in Patrick Parrinder (ed.), Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), pp. 127–45, p. 140. The (mis)quote is from Bernard Bergonzi, The Early H. G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1961), p. 134. See also Aldiss, Billion Year Spree, p. 118; Rieder, Colonialism, pp. 5–7, 10, 131–5.

  25. On the term ‘reverse colonisation’, see Stephen D. Arata, ‘The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonisation’, Victorian Studies, 33/4 (Summer 1990), 621–45.

  26. 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. 11.

  27. See, for instance, Keith Waterhouse, ‘The Master of the – Bug-Eyed Monsters!’, Daily Mirror, 1 February 1957; Derek Hart’s interview with John Wyndham on The Tonight Show, broadcast on the BBC on 6 September 1960, http://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/writers/12206.shtml (accessed 8 April 2011); Ketterer, ‘Questions and Answers’, 10.

  28. Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902), with The Congo Diary, ed. Robert Hampson (London: Penguin Books, 1995), p. 84.

  29. Sven Lindqvist, ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’ (1992), trans. Joan Tate (London: Granta Books, 2002), p. 8. The quotations are from Margaret T. Hodgen’s Early Anthropology in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1964).

  30. Lindqvist, Exterminate, p. 75.

  31. See, for instance, Rieder, Colonialism, pp. 27, 84–9. Rieder also notes that one the first human reactions to the Martians in Wells’s The War of the Worlds is ‘What ugly brutes!’ (Rieder, Colonialism, p. 134).

  32. 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, pp. 465–7; Bleiler, Science-Fiction, p. 406. The newspaper hoax, ‘Crinoida Dajeeana’, later reprinted as ‘The Man-Eating Tree’ and ‘The Man-Eating Tree of Madagascar’, was published in the 28 April 1874 issue of the New York World, and can be found in Chad Arment (ed.), Botanica Delira: More Stories of Strange, Undiscovered, and Murderous Vegetation (Landisville, PA: Coachwhip Publications, 2010), pp. 46–54.

  33. Ketterer, ‘The Genesis of the Triffids’, 11. See also Sam Moskowitz, Seekers of Tomorrow: Masters of Modern Science Fiction (1966) (New York: Ballantine Books, 1967), p. 132. In his forthcoming biography of Wyndham, David Ketterer also suggests William F. Temple’s ‘The Kosso’, published in the anthology Thrills (1935), and Olaf Stapledon’s Star Maker (1937) as possible sources of inspiration for the triffids, as they both contain ambulatory plants (Temple and Wyndham were friends, and Wyndham reviewed Stapledon’s novel in the fanzine Scientifiction in 1937), but Ketterer also mentions Ward Moore’s Greener Than You Think (1947), which Wyndham reviewed in Fantasy Review in 1949.

  34. Miller, ‘Lives of the Monster Plants’, 466.

  35. Miller, ‘Lives of the Monster Plants’, 462.

  36. Rieder, Colonialism, p. 21. Many of the themes and plots Rieder discusses in his chapter on invasions and catastrophes (Rieder, Colonialism, pp. 123–55), such as contagion, and purification and hyperbolic violence, can be traced in Triffids. The former for instance in the way the triffids are dispersed and cultivated, and the latter especially in the very last lines of the novel, which Manlove has characterised as ‘a Churchillian finale’ (Manlove, ‘Everything Slipping Away’, 33).

  37. Robert Shepherd, Enoch Powell (London: Hutchinson, 1996), p. 346.

  38. The purpose of the Tanganyika groundnut scheme was to grow groundnuts (peanuts) in Tanganyika (nowadays mainland Tanzania) on a massive scale using British ex-soldiers and military equipment (cf. Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, p. 19), with the dual aim of alleviating the food crisis in the UK (with vegetable oil from peanuts, used as a cooking fat) and helping the Tanganyikan economy. Due to a number of reasons, however – such as adverse weather conditions, with floods and droughts, problems with wild animals and insects, and unyielding, dense thorn brush where the peanuts were supposed to be grown – the whole enterprise resulted in a very costly failure. (See, for instance, Alan Wood, The Groundnut Affair (London: The Bodley Head, 1950).)

  39. Even though the oldest extant manuscript also has the triffids coming from Venus (see below), and the planet figured prominently in Wyndham’s early writings, he claimed that this was an afterthought, intended for the American sf market (Ketterer, ‘The Genesis of the Triffids’, 13).

  40. John Wyndham, ‘Revolt of the Triffids’, ill. Fred Banbery, Collier’s, (6 January to 3 February 1951), 6 January 1951, 64.

  41. Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 4. See also Rieder, Colonialism, pp. 25–6.

  42. Wyndham, ‘Revolt of the Triffids’, 6 January 1951, 64.

  43. Unlike in the UK edition (Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, p. 27), the scattering triffid seeds are then likened to the primary crops of the New World colonies: ‘Some thought the mysterious substance might be cotton, and that wasn’t a bad guess’ (Wyndham, ‘Revolt of the Triffids’, 6 January 1951, 64).

  44. See Ketterer, ‘The Genesis of the Triffids’, 13–14.

  45. See, for instance John Wyndham, Undated manuscript (mainly holograph) for The Day of the Triffids, Reference Wyndham 1/3/1 in the John Wyndham Archive, The Sydney Jones Library Special Collections, University of Liverpool, holo p. 9, typed p. 13 and holo insert ap. 22A.

  46. See also Määttä, ‘The Politics of Post-Apocalypse’, pp. 222–3.

  47. Wyndham, Undated manuscript, holo pp. 5–6, 12. See also Matthew Moore, ‘A critical study of John Wyndham’s major works’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Liverpool, 2007), 102–3.

  48. Wyndham, Undated manuscript, holo p. 6.

  49. Wyndham, Undated manuscript, holo pp. 8–9. The omissions in quotes from the MS often mark Wyndham’s own deletions, almost invariably due to rephrasings.

  50. Wyndham, Undated manuscript, holo p. 9.

  51. Wyndham, Undated manuscript, insert p. 1 of 3 between pp. 307A and 308. The line about triffids being ‘monsters … in their home forests’ is probably a reference to the fact that they, in this early manuscript and on their native Venus, ‘for reasons of climate, lesser gravity or different soil constituents frequently grew to forty or even fifty feet’ (Wyndham, Undated manuscript, holo p. 21A).

  52. Intriguingly, ‘No Place Like Earth’, published in the same year as Triffids, depicts the exploitation of the small, idle, alien ‘griffas’ on Venus. Apart from the similarity in names (‘griffas’, ‘triffids’), and the fact that whips play a central role in the story (they are used to force the griffas to perform hard labour for the human colonisers), the griffas are even briefly compared to flowers and trees – as is the love interest in the story, Zaylo, an indigenous Martian woman who is likened to a carnivorous plant. (See John Wyndham, ‘No Place Like Earth’ (1951), in John Wyndham, Exiles on Asperus (London: Coronet Books, Hodder & Stoughton, 1979), pp. 67–94.) In the UK, the short story was published in the spring 1951 issue of 10 Story Fantasy as ‘Tyrant and Slave-Girl on Planet Venus’, with a cover illustration (by an unknown artist) showing a black man and a white man having a whip fight over a scantily clad white woman.

  53. See also Kerslake, Science Fiction and Empire, pp. 28, 36–42.

  54. Ketterer, ‘The Genesis of the Triffids’, 12. See also Beynon Harris, ‘[My Brother,] Joh
n Wyndham’, 24.

  55. John Wyndham, ‘The Puff-Ball Menace’ (1933), in John Wyndham, Wanderers of Time (London: Coronet Books, Hodder & Stoughton, 1973), pp. 135–58, pp. 135–6.

  56. Wyndham, ‘The Puff-Ball Menace’, pp. 136, 158.

  57. Wyndham, ‘The Puff-Ball Menace’, pp. 154, 144.

  58. Ruddick, Ultimate Island, p. 139.

  59. Phil Gochenour, ‘“Different Conditions Set Different Standards”: The Ecology of Ethics in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids’, The New York Review of Science Fiction, 274 (June 2011), 1, 10–19, p. 10.

  60. On Wyndham, Darwinism, evolutionary theory and plant research in Triffids, see Moore, ‘A critical study’, 43–108; Adam Stock, ‘The Blind Logic of Plants: Enlightenment and Evolution in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids’, Science Fiction Studies, 127 (November 2015), 433– 57, 439–42; Adamson and Sandilands, ‘Insinuations’, pp. 240–3.

  61. Ruddick, Ultimate Island, p. 140.

  62. Rieder, Colonialism, p. 7.

  63. This essay was originally researched and conceived during a postdoc at the School of English, University of Liverpool, in 2010–11, sponsored by a generous scholarship from The Wenner-Gren Foundations. I am very grateful to Professor David Seed, Mr Andy Sawyer and Professor David Ketterer for their kind advice and warm hospitality during our stay.

  3. Botanical Tentacles and the Chthulucene

  1. H. P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror (New York: Ballantine Books, 1991), p. 73.

  2. An interesting nineteenth-century precursor is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fanciful tale ‘Rappaccini’s Daughter’ (1844), as I outline in ‘“Tentacular Thinking” and the “Abcanny” in Hawthorne’s Gothic Gardens of Masculine Egotism’, forthcoming.

  3. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, pp. 66 and 26.

  4. John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (1951) (London: Penguin, 2008), p. 39.

  5. 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. 461.

  6. Miller, ‘Lives of the Monster Plants’, 461.

  7. Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2016), p. 32. See also Donna Haraway, ‘Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene’, e-flux journal, 75 (September 2016), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/75/67125/tentacular-thinking-anthropocene-capitalocene-chthulucene/ (last accessed 8 May 2019).

  8. Miller, ‘Lives of the Monster Plants’, 465.

  9. China Miéville, ‘M. R. James and the Quantum Vampire’, Weird Fiction Review, 29 November 2011, http://weirdfictionreview.com/2011/11/m-r-james-and-the-quantum-vampire-by-china-mieville/ (last accessed 20 April 2017).

  10. Miller, ‘Lives of the Monster Plants’, 475.

  11. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, pp. 55 and 2.

  12. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 2.

  13. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 31.

  14. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 56.

  15. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 55.

  16. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 31.

  17. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 31.

  18. See ‘tentacle’, in the Oxford English Dictionary, https://en.oxford dictionaries.com/definition/tentacle (last accessed 02 April 2019).

  19. Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, p. 9.

  20. Michael Pollan, The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World (London: Bloomsbury, 2001), p. 261.

  21. Pollan, The Botany of Desire, p. 265.

  22. Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann, ‘Introduction: Stories Come to Matter’, in Serenella Iovino and Serpil Oppermann (eds), Material Ecocriticism (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014), pp. 1–17, p. 11.

  23. Pollan, The Botany of Desire, p. 265.

  24. Chad Arment, ‘Preface’, in Chad Arment (ed.), Botanica Delira: More Stories of Strange, Undiscovered, and Murderous Vegetation (Landisville, PA: Coachwhip Publications, 2010), pp. 9–10, p. 9.

  25. Arment, ‘Preface’, pp. 9–10.

  26. ‘Cryptobotany’, in the Collins Dictionary, https://collinsdictionary.com/submission/12072/Cryptobotany (last accessed 2 April 2019).

  27. Terence E. Hanley, ‘Trees and Other Plants on the Cover of Weird Tales’, Tellers of Weird Tales, 11 February 2014, https://tellersofweirdtales. blogspot.uk/2014/02/trees-and-other-plants-on-cover-of.html (last accessed 2 April 2019).

  28. H. P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature (1927/1934), published at The H. P. Lovecraft Archive, http://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/essays/shil.aspx (last accessed 7 April 2019).

  29. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature.

  30. Michel Houellebecq, H. P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life, trans. Dorna Khazeni (London: Gollancz, 2008), p. 24.

  31. Sophus A. Reinert, ‘The Economy of Fear: H. P. Lovecraft on Eugenics, Economics and the Great Depression’, Horror Studies, 6/2 (2015), 255– 82, p. 256.

  32. Lovecraft cited in Reinert, ‘The Economy of Fear’, 271.

  33. Lovecraft cited in Reinert, ‘The Economy of Fear’, 267.

  34. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, p. 105.

  35. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, p. 5.

  36. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, pp. 19–20, 24.

  37. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, pp. 20–1.

  38. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, pp. 21–2.

  39. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, p. 25.

  40. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, p. 24.

  41. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, p. 22.

  42. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, p. 25.

  43. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness, p. 67.

  44. Reinert, ‘The Economy of Fear’, 276.

  45. Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, pp. 28–9.

  46. Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, pp. 26–7.

  47. Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, p. 32.

  48. Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, p. 36.

  49. Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, pp. 37–8.

  50. Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, pp. 42–3.

  51. Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, p. 44.

  52. Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, pp. 38, 42.

  53. Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, p. 48.

  54. Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, p. 236.

  55. Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, p. 29.

  56. Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, p. 33.

  57. Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, pp. 44 and 39.

  58. Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, p. 272.

  59. Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, p. 197.

  60. Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids, p. 242.

  61. Andrew Liptak, ‘John Wyndham and the Global Expansion of Science Fiction’, Kirkus, 7 May 2015, https://kirkusreviews.com/features/john-wyndham-and-global-expansion-science-fiction/ (last accessed 6 April 2019).

  62. John Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden (1969) (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1978), p. vii.

  63. Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden, p. vii.

  64. Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden, p. 117.

  65. Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden, p. 153.

  66. Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden, pp. 33, 72.

  67. Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden, p. 179.

  68. Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden, p. 144.

  69. Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden, p. 144.

  70. Angela Overy, Sex in Your Garden (Golden, CO: Fulcrum, 1997), p. 9.

  71. Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden, p. 9.

  72. Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden, p. 33.

  73. Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden, p. 33.

  74. Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden, p. 53.

  75. Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden, p. 191.

  76. Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden, p. 192
.

  77. Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden, pp. 15, 17.

  78. Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden, pp. 190–1.

  79. Jim Endersby, Orchid: A Cultural History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), p. 222.

  80. Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden, pp. 187–8.

  81. Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden, pp. 189, 192.

  82. Boyd, The Pollinators of Eden, p. viii.

  83. Endersby, Orchid, p. 220.

  84. Donna Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan©_ Meets_OncoMouse™ (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 88.

  85. Lou Anders, ‘Interview with China Miéville’, Believer, 23 (April 2005), https://believermag.com/an-interview-with-china-mieville/ (last accessed 8 May 2019).

  86. Caroline Edwards and Tony Venezia, ‘Unintroduction: China Miéville’s Weird Universe’, in Caroline Edwards and Tony Venezia (eds), China Miéville: Critical Essays (Canterbury: Gylphi, 2015), pp. 1–38, p. 6.

  87. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 12.

  88. Isabelle Stengers cited in Mario Blaser, ‘Is Another Cosmopolitics Possible?’, Cultural Anthropology, 31/4 (2016), 545–70, p. 547.

  89. China Miéville, ‘China Miéville’s Top 10 Weird Fiction Books’, The Guardian, 16 May 2002, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2002/may/16/fiction.bestbooks (last accessed 7 April 2019).

  90. Miéville, ‘M. R. James and the Quantum Vampire’.

  91. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, pp. 53–4.

  92. Miéville, ‘M. R. James and the Quantum Vampire’.

  93. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble, p. 47.

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

  1. Michael Marder, Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), p. 67.

  2. The English translations provided throughout this essay originate from the subtitles of a bootleg DVD copy of the film. I have checked their accuracy against the Russian audio and, in cases of ambiguity, have supplied the original Russian in brackets for context.