Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Christopher’s novels welded the traditional British disaster story with an emergent trend of eco-catastrophe that gained strength during the 1960s. The master of this new genre was J. G. Ballard, whose quartet of novels—The Wind from Nowhere (1960), The Drowned World (1962), The Drought (1964), and The Crystal World (1966)—variously scoured the earth, inundated it, desiccated it, and (most curiously and perversely) immured it in a jewel-like crust. Throughout these works the author appears fundamentally uninterested either in explaining the disasters (only The Drought posits a human cause: widespread pollution of the oceans) or in depicting valiant efforts to fend off their ravages. Instead, the protagonists struggle towards a private accommodation with the cataclysms, a psychic attunement to their radical reorderings of the environment; as Luckhurst argues, “the transformation of landscape marks the termination of rationally motivated instrumental consciousness.”17 In other words, the very mindset that produced imperial hegemony—the confidence in reason, disciplined deployment of technoscience, and posture of mastery—has eroded, replaced by a deracinated fatalism and an almost mystical embrace of its own antiquation.

  For Fredric Jameson, Ballard’s scenarios of “world-dissolution” amount to little more than the exhausted “imagination of a dying class—the cancelled future of a vanished colonial and imperial destiny [that] seeks to intoxicate itself with images of death,”18 Yet, while it is difficult to argue that Ballard’s novels express a conscious politics—aside from the ironized libidinal commitments of a surrealism tinged with Freud—his influence over what came to be known as SF’s “New Wave” helped foster an overtly anti-hegemonic strain of eco-disaster stories during the 1960s and early 1970s. The New Wave generally adopted an anti-technocratic bent that put it at odds with the technophilic optimism of Campbellian hard SF, openly questioning if not the core values of scientific inquiry, then the larger social processes to which they had been conjoined in the service of state and corporate power.19 This critique of technocracy gradually aligned itself with other ideological programs seeking to reform or revolutionize social relations, such as feminism, ecological activism, and postcolonial struggles, adopting a counter-cultural militancy that rejected pulp SF’s quasi-imperialist vision of white men conquering the stars in the name of Western progress. While Ballard might not have embraced this polemical thrust, his subversive disaster stories, with their stark irrationalism and pointed mockery of technoscientific ambitions, gave it a significant impetus as well as a potent model to follow.

  Thomas M. Disch’s 1965 novel The Genocides is definitely cast in the Ballardian mode, a positioning that drew the fire of critics opposed to the New Wave’s ideological renovation of the field. Disch’s novel, which depicts an earth transformed by faceless aliens into an agricultural colony in which humans are mere pests awaiting extermination, became something of a political hot potato within the genre. Responding to a laudatory review of the book by Judith Merril, the most prominent advocate for the New Wave among American commentators, Algis Budrys attacked the novel as “pretentious, inconsistent, and sophomoric,” an insult to “the school of science fiction which takes hope in science and in Man.”20 Contrasting it with Heinlein’s latest effort, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), which depicts “strong personalities doing things about their situation,” its hero a “practical man-of-all-work figure” who just keeps “plugging away,” Budrys complains about Disch’s “dumb, resigned victims” who simply wait passively to be destroyed.21 Unlike the can-do heroism of Heinlein and his ilk, The Genocides is an “inertial” SF novel, modelled on the disaster stories of Ballard, wherein “characters who regard the physical universe as a mysterious and arbitrary place, and who would not dream of trying to understand its actual laws” putter about listlessly in a suicidal haze.22 As David Hartwell comments, Budrys clearly could not imagine a successful work of SF in which scientific knowledge is not “a priori adequate to solve whatever problem the plot poses”—even, in this case, when vastly superior alien technologies have seeded and irretrievably transformed the entire surface of the planet.23

  In a curious aside, Budrys considers the possibility that Disch is rejecting the “Engineers-Can-Do-Anything school” of pulp SF in favor of an older, more satirical and pessimistic tradition that extends back to H. G. Wells; and he goes on to forecast an imaginary critical-historical study championing Ballard for “having singlehandedly returned the field to its main stem” following the pulp era’s arguably naive optimism.24 Budrys’s projected title for this volume, Cartography of Chaos, seems precisely to acknowledge the entropic dissolution of the scientific modes of missionary imperialism accomplished by the New Wave disaster story, although Budrys does not really develop the point. Another review of the novel, by Brian Aldiss, made a more concerted effort to link Disch with a strain of visionary pessimism in the field. Decrying the “facile optimism” of American pulp SF, with its fantasies of a prodigal nature effortlessly exploited by a sagacious “scientocracy,” Aldiss praises The Genocides for providing “an unadulterated shot of pure bracing gloom.”25 The effect, despite Disch’s American provenance, is “curiously English,” portraying a “dwindling community” confronting an “unbeatable problem [. . .] as credible a menace as I ever came on.”26 Aldiss never quite explains why this scenario should be viewed as particularly English, but he doubtless had in mind the Wyndham—Ballard school of post-imperial melancholy, here transplanted to the United States.

  And, indeed, that is the signal accomplishment of Disch’s novel: to extrapolate the end-of-empire thematics of the post-war disaster story to a specifically American context. Certainly, by the mid- to late 1960s, revisionist historians and left-wing political commentators such as William Appleman Williams, David Horowitz, Gabriel Kolko, and Harry Magdoff had begun to critique US foreign policy during the Cold War as explicitly imperialist, driven by economic and military imperatives designed to enrich and expand the powers of a corporate elite.27 While not suggesting that Disch was expressly aware of these thinkers, I do feel that his novel belongs within the general orbit of a New Wave critique of modern technocracy, scorning his country’s nascent imperial aims with the same cold-eyed cynicism that Wells summoned to chasten his late-Victorian compatriots. Even more than Wells, Disch stresses the total indifference of the aliens to the monuments of human civilization, excrescent “artifacts” they are capable of wiping away as casually as a farmer uproots weeds; as one character bitterly muses:

  It wounded his pride to think that his race, his species was being defeated with such apparent ease. What was worse, what he could not endure was the suspicion that it all meant nothing, that the process of their annihilation was something quite mechanical: that mankind’s destroyers were not, in other words, fighting a war but merely spraying the garden.28

  Indeed, as this mundane metaphor suggests, Disch, in The Genocides, develops a powerful critique of what has subsequently come to be called by environmental historians and activists “ecological imperialism.”

  As the discipline of ecology was consolidated during the post-war period, and especially as the concept of ecosystem as a functional totality of life processes gained widespread currency,29 evolutionary biologists began to study the implications of the introduction of foreign flora and fauna into existing environments. The classic study in the field is Charles S. Elton’s The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants, first published in 1958 and still in widespread use in biology classrooms.30 Elton considers such significant “biotic invasions” as the spread of the Japanese beetle throughout the Northern US and the incursion of sea lampreys into the Great Lakes region, theorizing their competition for resources with native species, their unsettlement of and integration into food chains, and the ramifying consequences of genetic mixing through subsequent generations. In order to convey the dramatic quality of these “great historical convulsions,” Elton occasionally has recourse to SF texts to furnish illuminating models or metaphors, from Professor Challenger’s discovery of a �
��lost world” of primordial life in Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1912 novel to the uncontrollable dissemination of escaped laboratory animals in H. G. Wells’s 1905 The Food of the Gods.31 As the latter example suggests, the study of biotic invasions cannot ignore the important role of human agency; as Elton comments, “One of the primary reasons for the spread and establishment of species has been quite simply the movement around the world by man of plants, especially those brought for crops or garden ornament or forestry.”32 He even addresses the history of colonial expansion, in a chapter considering the impact on the ecosystems of remote islands of Captain Cook’s voyages during the late eighteenth century.33

  During the 1970s and 80s environmental historians began to extrapolate some of the insights of ecosystems theory to explain the consequences of major migrations of human populations. William McNeill’s Plagues and Peoples (1976), which examines the role of disease in shaping historical encounters between cultures, meticulously shows, in a chapter entitled “Transatlantic Exchanges,” how the European conquest of the Americas was facilitated by the “biological vulnerability” of Amerindian groups to foreign pathogens, especially smallpox.34 Rather than attributing the success of New World colonization to superior technology and culture alone, works such as McNeill’s—and William Cronon’s Changes in the Land (1983), which examines the environmental impact of the introduction of European livestock and agricultural practices in colonial New England35—anatomized the role, intended and unintended, of biotic transfers in conferring an advantage in the competition between native peoples and foreign invaders. As Alfred Crosby summarizes in his landmark work of synthesis Ecological Imperialism (1986), “the Europeans had to disassemble an existing ecosystem before they could have one that accorded with their needs,” with the outcome at times resembling “a toy that has been played with too roughly by a thoughtless colossus.”36 In this new colonial history the influence of Christianity and gunpowder pales beside the proliferating synergy of microbes and weeds, deforestation and domestication. In Alan Taylor’s words, “the remaking of the Americas was a team effort by a set of interdependent species led and partially managed (but never fully controlled) by European people.”37

  While Disch could certainly not have known this body of work when he wrote The Genocides, there is ample evidence that he was always deeply interested in ecological issues and in linking this concern with the developing New Wave critique of American technocracy. In 1971 Disch edited a major anthology of eco-catastrophe stories, The Ruins of Earth (1971), complaining in his introduction that “too often science fiction has given its implicit moral sanction” to wholesale transformations in the environment without concern for the consequences.38 This introduction, entitled “On Saving the World,” stands as one of the strongest statements of an ecological awareness within the New Wave assault on traditional SF:

  The very form of the so-called “hard-core” s-f saga, in which a single quasi-technological problem is presented and then solved, encourages [a] peculiar tunnel vision and singleness of focus that is the antithesis of an “ecological” consciousness in which cause-and-effect would be regarded as a web rather than as a single-strand chain. The heroes of these earlier tales often behave in ways uncannily reminiscent of psychotics’ case histories: personal relationships (as between the crew members of a spaceship) can be chillingly lacking in affect. These human robots inhabited landscapes that mirrored their own alienation.39

  SF, in short, had for too long been an uncritical cheerleader for the social engineering of nature emanating from a narrow technocratic mindset, and was only now beginning to shake free of this imperialistic delusion. Disch went on to celebrate the early novels of Ballard, especially The Drought, as prophetic visions of how a violated nature might take revenge on its heedless exploiters. Budrys was thus correct to infer in The Genocides a viewpoint inimical to “the school of science fiction which takes hope in science and in Man”—though instead of “hope,” Disch would have said “the faith, usually unquestioning, in a future in which Technology provides, unstintingly and without visible difficulty, for man’s needs.”40

  The Genocides is set in 1979, seven years after shadowy aliens have converted the planet into an agricultural preserve devoted to growing 600-foot trees with leaves “the size of billboards.”41 Pushing up through concrete, shouldering aside buildings, and growing at an incredible rate, the trees have destroyed the earth’s cities and thoroughly colonized its rural areas. The story focuses on a group of farmers, located in northern Minnesota, who free up arable land by bleeding sap from the alien plants, which eventually kills them and thus conserves a tiny clearing amidst the planet-wide canopy. In this clearing they maintain a plot of corn, which in turn supports a small livestock population. Unfortunately, the aliens—“bored agribusinessmen,” as Hartwell calls them, whose cultivation processes are entirely automated42—have finally taken notice of these human remnants, sending out flame-throwing drones “adequate for the extermination of such mammalian life as they are likely to encounter,” as one of their inter-office memos blandly puts it (p. 49; italics in original). The drones incinerate the farm community, sending a handful of desperate survivors into the trees’ hollow root system, where they subsist on the sugary fruit of the plants that grows underground. Murderous squabblings thin their ranks, which are further diminished by the arrival of mechanical harvesters that vacuum up the mature fruit. At the end, six ragged human scarecrows stagger across the scoured landscape, which has been burned clean by the harvesters, as the spores of “the second planting” begin to take root (p. 206).

  Hartwell’s reference to agribusiness is quite appropriate, since at one level the novel is a powerful critique of technoscientific methods for accelerating and amplifying natural processes of cultivation. This mechanized agriculture amounts to the systematic “rape of a planet” (p. 206), which has far-reaching consequences. A hybrid crop designed in alien labs, the trees are brilliantly efficient machines of growth, but their burgeoning comes at the expense of the overall ecology. Since they do not shed their leaves, no compost accumulates, so the topsoil rapidly withers to dust. Their greedy consumption of carbon dioxide is quickly cooling the planet, making the winters brutally severe. And their monopolization of resources has systematically killed off higher species: the “balance of nature had been so thoroughly upset that even animals one would not think threatened had joined the ever-mounting ranks of the extinct” (p. 26). An offhand allusion indicates the novel’s critical perspective: as winter recedes and no birds emerge to herald the new season, the narrator grimly comments, “it was a silent spring” (p. 169), thus referencing Rachel Carson’s classic 1962 critique of the deadly effects of agribusiness methods on the environment.43 Unfortunately, human beings do not have the luxury of being absentee landlords of the planet, as Disch’s aliens are, and so must suffer the long-term consequences of their ecological tinkering directly.

  Disch’s title, The Genocides, thus refers on one level to humanity’s imminent self-extinction through ecological mismanagement, a snuffing out the narrator comments on at the end with Wellsian detachment:

  Nature is prodigal. Of a hundred seedlings only one or two would survive; of a hundred species, only one or two.

  Not, however, man. (p. 208)

  On another level, the novel allegorizes the biotic invasion of the New World, which resulted in the wholesale destruction of native cultures and ways of life. Like the Europeans in America, the aliens reconfigure the existing ecosystem to satisfy their own needs, at first ignoring the original inhabitants and then, when their methods of cultivation come into competition, brutally eliminating them. Yet, as in the histories of ecological imperialism described above, the most effective genocidal technique by far is the environmental transformation wrought by the invaders, which literally makes indigenous modes of agriculture impossible. As William Cronon points out, “European perceptions of what constituted a proper use of the environment [. . .] reinforced what became a European ideolo
gy of conquest”: whereas Amerindians generally favored mobile settlements and subsistence agriculture supplemented by hunting, the colonists preferred fixed habitats, organized animal husbandry, and surplus crop production for purposes of trade.44 The latter system required widespread deforestation, which killed off deer populations on which the natives were dependent, and the cultivation of large tracts of land, now conceived as permanent property rather than an open bounty. Disch’s novel shows the consequences of such an arrangement from the Amerindian perspective, as the humans are confronted by literally alien biota maintained by superior technology and policed by ruthless violence.

  Disch’s jaundiced view of European supremacy in the New World is underlined by the most viciously satirical scene in the book, a Thanksgiving Day celebration. Following the incineration of their cattle by the alien machines, the community has lost its main source of protein. To promote harmony among a population grown restive and contentious, the governing patriarch decides to proceed with the occasion, serving up sausages prepared from the bodies of a group of urban marauders the community has recently slain. “Necessity might have been some justification. There was ample precedent (the Donner party, the wreck of the Medusa)” (p. 78). But the patriarch’s goal in enforcing this communal cannibalism is more sinister and jingoistic: to unite the group in a “complex bond,” a “sacrament” that transmutes the squalid act into patriotic solidarity (p. 78). And so the others sit there, chewing desultorily, bickering with one another, and growing drunk on liquor fermented from the sap of the alien trees. As their resident scientist dryly comments, “Survival is a matter of ecology. [. . .] Ecology is the way the different plants and animals live together. That is to say—who eats whom” (p. 79). This pathetic remnant of European colonization, enjoying a hallowed holiday feast that sentimentally commemorates its triumph, is reduced to feeding on their erstwhile countrymen in order to survive. Reinforcing this sarcastic portrait of collapsed American hegemony, Disch dates the aliens’ extermination order 4 July 1979, with the projected completion of the project 2 February 1980—Groundhog Day, now the harbinger of an eternal winter for the human race (p. 11; my emphasis). Watching Duluth go up in flames kindled by the alien drones, one of the characters waves and snickers, “goodbye, Western Civilization” (p. 51).