Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  While ecological extrapolation was not new to SF in 1965—indeed, Frank Herbert’s Dune, serialized in Analog magazine during 1963–64, probably did more than any other single book to bring ecological awareness into the centre of the genre—Disch’s The Genocides gave the topic a sharp polemical edge through its arraignment of traditional SF’s complaisant scientism. Technoscientific development, in the novel, is not a cure-all for the problems posed, but is itself the problem: the faceless alien technocrats, armed with a battery of sophisticated machines, show a casual contempt not only for natural balance but for human life itself. The besieged community Disch portrays has as much chance against this monolithic apparatus as Third World farmers have against Western agribusiness enterprises; their small-scale agrarian revolt, pitched against the environmental monopoly of the trees, fails as miserably as, say, the Guatemalan revolution against the United Fruit Company in the 1950s. Disch’s novel points the way towards more politicized engagements with ecological issues in SF, such as John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968) and The Sheep Look Up (1972); as Michael Stern observes of the latter novel, “the relation of the US to the rest of the earth’s societies [. . .] takes the form of a total but undeclared ecological war”45—an invasion less of Western biota than of industrial pollution, resource extraction, and neocolonial “development” projects. During the early 1970s, the genre witnessed not only a handful of theme anthologies devoted to these issues—including, alongside Disch’s Ruins of Earth, Rob Sauer’s Voyages: Scenarios for a Ship Called Earth (1971), and Roger Elwood and Virginia Kidd’s Saving Worlds (1973)—but even fanzines with an environmentalist agenda, such as Susan Glicksohn’s short-lived Aspidistra. In the balance of this essay, though, I shall focus on a second major New Wave text that specifically treats ecological imperialism in the terms outlined above: Ursula K. Le Guin’s short novel The Word for World is Forest (1972).46

  In many ways Le Guin’s novel reads like an inversion of The Genocides: rather than the victims of biotic invasion, earth people are the invaders; and rather than seeding a host of trees, they lay waste to a vast forest on the planet Athshe. Le Guin quite calculatedly draws parallels between the exploration of space and the history of Western colonialism: despite the existence of “Ecological Protocols” governing interaction with alien biospheres, largely designed to keep other worlds from being reduced to the “desert of cement” bereft of animal life that the Earth itself has become,47 the colonists on Athshe behave exactly like classic imperialists, renaming the planet “New Tahiti,” conscripting its humanoid population into forced labor camps, and systematically extracting its riches, especially lumber. The tale’s main villain, Captain Davidson, captures the mindset perfectly: contemptuous of the natives as lazy “creechies,” yet lusting after their women, eager to command the landscape as proof of his manhood and cultural superiority, he can see in the endless vistas of trees only a “meaningless” expanse of wasted resources, rather than the richly meaningful cultural world it is for the native inhabitants. He has nothing but scorn for the “bleeding-heart” attitudes of the expedition’s token ecologist and anthropologist, viewing the situation in basically military terms: “you’ve got to play on the winning side or else you lose. And it’s Man that wins, every time. The old Conquistador.”48 Whereas in Disch the motives of the alien invaders remain obscure, Le Guin provides, in Davidson, a scathing portrait of overweening racist machismo as the root impulse supporting projects of imperial domination. While the effect is perhaps to overly psychologize the colonial relationship, de-emphasizing crucial political-economic imperatives, her treatment does infuse a strong ecofeminist consciousness into the traditional invasion scenario.49

  Still, the tale did have an essentially political origin; Le Guin has indicated that the military-ecological rape of Vietnam by US forces is what impelled her writing:

  it was becoming clear that the ethic which approved the defoliation of forests and the murder of noncombatants in the name of “peace” was only a corollary of the ethic which permits the despoliation of natural resources for private profit or the GNP, and the murder of the creatures of the Earth in the name of “man.”50

  Thus we see Davidson and his renegade band decimating creechie villages in classic counter-insurgency fashion, “dropping firejelly cans and watch[ing] them run around and burn,”51 while the Athsheans adopt guerilla tactics as the only effective resistance. These blatant historical connections have led to complaints by some critics that the story is overly tendentious and moralizing.52 Yet, as Ian Watson points out, the plot is broadly allegorical and can symbolize any number of instances of ecological imperialism, including “the genocide of the Guyaki Indians of Paraguay, or the genocide and deforestation along the Trans-Amazon Highway in Brazil, or even the general destruction of rain-forest habitats from Indonesia to Costa Rica.”53 William Cronon has shown how deforestation was a major factor in the reconfiguration of New World biota by European colonists: an ecological habitat to which the natives had adapted themselves was systematically culled to serve a new “mosaic” of settlement; and, like Captain Davidson and his comrades, the “colonists themselves understood what they were doing wholly in positive terms, not as ‘deforestation,’ but as ‘the progress of cultivation’”54—even though the effects were often pernicious, ranging from topsoil erosion, to increased flooding, to the spread of marshes with their attendant diseases. The callous quality of the transformations wrought: by the colonists, their lack of concern for enduring consequences, in both the historical record and in Le Guin’s story, suggests the heedless alien genocide depicted with such casual savagery in Disch’s novel.

  A key difference between Le Guin’s work and Disch’s, however, is that by the early 1970s a quite developed discourse regarding the effects of ecological devastation, and a growingly militant environmentalist movement, had risen up to assert the “rights” of nature and native peoples over against the needs of Western neocolonialism. Generally guided by an ethic of “responsibility” and governed by a concern for long-term “sustainability,” this movement was propelled by a conviction that the ongoing exploitation of nature augured nothing short of a catastrophe for the planet—Ecocide, according to the title of a 1971 collection of essays.55 The Club of Rome’s best-selling study The Limits to Growth, published in the same year as Le Guin’s novel, argued that current levels of resource depletion were likely to lead to major socioeconomic crises in the relatively near future. The Word for World Is Forest reflects these anxieties in its depiction of a home planet literally bereft of foliage, dependent on alien jungles to satisfy its appetite for “clean sawn planks, more prized on Earth than gold.”56

  In terms of the ethics of interaction with other species, positions ranged from John Passmore’s view, in Man’s Responsibility for Nature (1974), that human life is the basic standard of value in terms of which all potential violence against animals or plants must be gauged, to more radical arguments for the inalienable “rights” of nonhuman beings, such as Peter Singer’s brief for Animal Liberation (1975).57 An interesting text with relevance to Le Guin’s story is legal scholar Christopher Stone’s 1971 essay “Should Trees Have Standing?.” Written as an intervention in a lawsuit pitting the Sierra Club against the Disney Corporation’s efforts to build a resort in California’s Sierra mountains, Stone’s essay was groundbreaking in its attempt to define legal “‘injury’ not merely in human terms but with regard to nature. [. . .] Stone argued in all seriousness that trout and herons and cottonwood trees should be thought of as the injured parties in a water-pollution case,” and not simply the people who might be deprived of clean water or the opportunity to enjoy a pristine landscape.58 The impulse to protect trees in particular, not merely owing to their human uses but intrinsically for themselves, formed a significant impulse of the environmental movement, as the deployment of the term “green” as a political rallying cry suggests.59 On the one hand, this impulse may merely express a sentimental romanticization of nature, one
that has too readily led to the disparagement of environmentalists as “tree huggers” (an identification facilitated, for example, by the dedication to an anthology commemorating the first Earth Day celebration: “to the tree from which this book is made”);60 on the other hand, if pursued with intellectual rigor, such an attitude could lead to a conceptualization of “nature” not as an anthropocentric tool or an essentialist “other,” but as a socially constructed reality with important dimensions of agency and autonomy.61

  Le Guin’s abiding humanism, however, makes it difficult for her to articulate an ethic of rights that does not inhere ultimately in human subjects. While the novel fudges the issue essentially by identifying the Athsheans with their habitat—like the forest, they are peaceful, close-knit, and actually green—the effect is to naturalize their culture and to see the violence committed against them as an environmental desecration. The forest is their world, as the title indicates, and alterations to it are alterations to them; by the end, they have, like the trees, learned violence and been scarred by the knowledge. They have been “changed, radically, from the root” by “an infection, a foreign plague.”62 The model of moral relation Le Guin finally defends is not surprising given the central bond in her celebrated novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)—a friendship, despite differences, between sentient humanoids. The novel’s anthropologist-hero, Lyubov, is everything Captain Davidson is not: empathetic towards the Athsheans and comfortable in the enveloping forest, fondly protective of their mutual innocence and dignity.63 Not only does this depiction bear a lingering noble-savage Romanticism,64 but it leaves open the question of whether the denuding and strip-mining of an uninhabited planet would be ethically acceptable. If the forest were not someone’s indigenous world, would it then be ripe for the picking? Can ecological imperialism only be committed against human subjects or their fictional surrogates?

  Le Guin’s attitude towards technoscience and its role in colonial conquest is also more ambivalent than in previous New Wave eco-catastrophes. Unlike Disch’s The Genocides, in which advanced science is exclusively an agency of domination; and unlike eco-critics such as Lynn White, whose influential 1967 essay “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis” indicts Europe’s “superior technology” that permitted its “small, mutually hostile nations [to] spill out over all the rest of the world, conquering, looting, and colonizing”;65 Le Guin draws a distinction (a quite reasonable one in my view) between military-industrial technologies designed for violent purposes, whether warfare or resource extraction, and communication technologies, which allow for the exchange of ideas and information. In the novel, the arrival on the planet of an ansible—an interstellar radio that permits instantaneous messaging, despite the decades-long time-lag of space travel—is the mechanism that alerts the new League of Worlds to the violation of Ecological Protocols and leads to the termination of the colonial administration and the eventual economic quarantining of the planet. Similarly, in the present day, communications media such as the Internet have facilitated the worldwide dissemination of data about serious ecological problems, such as global warming,66 and computer simulation software has been used to model ecosystem interactions, such as (to cite a relevant example) the growth and decline of forest areas.67 Le Guin, to her credit, resists the assumption, common to some New Wave texts, that Western technoscience itself has been irreparably contaminated by its conscription for technocratic-imperialist ends.

  In his environmental history of the twentieth century, J. R. McNeill summarizes recent biotic invasions and concludes with a prognostication: “In the twenty-first century, the pace of invasions is not likely to slacken, and new genetically engineered organisms may also occasionally achieve ecological release and fashion dramas of their own.”68 If they do, one can be certain that SF writers will be there to chronicle the results, and to craft powerful moral allegories out of them. While they will doubtless draw upon the compelling example of major New Wave precursors, it is likely that their treatments of the topic will cleave closer to Le Guin’s ethical-political ambivalence than to Disch’s neo-Wellsian despair.

  Notes

  1. Peter Fitting, “Estranged Invaders: The War of the Worlds,” in Learning from Other Worlds: Estrangement, Cognition, and the Politics of Science Fiction and Utopia, ed. by Patrick Parrinder (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2000), pp. 127–45 (p. 127).

  2. Fitting, p. 130.

  3. Fitting, p. 131.

  4. H. G. Wells, A Critical Edition of The War of the Worlds: H.G. Wells’s Scientific Romance, ed. by David Y. Hughes and Harry M. Geduld (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), p. 52.

  5. Stephen D. Arata, “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization,” Victorian Studies, 33.4 (1990), 621–45; Brian W. Aldiss, with David Wingrove, Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (New York: Avon, 1988), pp. 120–21.

  6. John Rieder, “Science Fiction, Colonialism, and the Plot of Invasion,” Extrapolation, 46.3 (2005), 373–94 (p. 376).

  7. Rieder, p. 376.

  8. Rieder, p. 378.

  9. Eric R. Wolf, Europe and the People without History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982).

  10. Brian Stableford and David Pringle, “Invasion,” in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, ed. by Peter Nicholls and John Clute (New York: St. Martin’s, 1993), pp. 623–25 (p. 624).

  11. John W. Campbell, Jr., Letter to A. E. van Vogt, 3 March 1945, in The John W. Campbell Letters, Volume 1, ed. by Perry A. Chapdelaine, Sr., Tony Chapdelaine, and George Hay (Franklin, TN: AC Projects, 1985), pp. 49–55 (p. 55).

  12. Robert A. Heinlein, The Puppet Masters, rev. edn (New York: Del Rey, 1990), p. 338. For a reading of the novel as an allegory of Cold War conflicts see H. Bruce Franklin, Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 98–101.

  13. Rob Latham, “Subterranean Suburbia: Underneath the Smalltown Myth in the Two Versions of Invaders from Mars,” Science Fiction Studies, 22.2 (1995), 198–208 (p. 201). For a discussion of the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers that links it with Weils’s and Heinlein’s novels, see David Seed, “Alien Invasions by Body Snatchers and Related Creatures,” in Modern Gothic: A Reader, ed. by Victor Sage and Allen L. Smith (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), pp. 152–70.

  14. Cyndy Hendershot, “Anti-Communism and Ambivalence in Red Planet Mars, Invasion USA, and The Beast of Yucca Flats,” Science Fiction Studies, 28.2 (2001), 246–60.

  15. Roger Luckhurst, Science Fiction (Cambridge: Polity, 2005), pp, 131–32.

  16. Aldliss, Trillion Year Spree, p. 255. For an alternative take on Wyndham’s work, which defends him as a more subversive writer than Aldiss allows, see Rowland Wymer, “How ‘Safe’ is John Wyndham? A Closer Look at his Work, with Particular Reference to The Cluysalids’, Foundation,” 55 (1992), 25–36.

  17. Roger Luckhurst, “The Angle Between Two Walls”: The Fiction of J. G. Ballard (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1995), p. 53.

  18. Fredric Jameson, “Progress Versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?,” Science Fiction Studies, 9.2 (1982), 147–58 (p. 152).

  19. For an overview of the New Wave movement see my “The New Wave,” in A Companion to Science Fiction, ed. by David Seed (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), pp. 202–16. See also Luckhurst, Science Fiction, pp. 141–95.

  20. Algis Budrys, “Galaxy Bookshelf,” Galaxy, 25.2 (1966), 125–33 (p. 130).

  21. Budrys, pp. 127, 130.

  22. Budrys, p. 128.

  23. David Hartwell, Introduction to Thomas M. Disch, The Genocides (Boston: Gregg, 1978), pp. v–xv (p. xiv).

  24. Budrys, pp. 129, 131.

  25. Brian W. Aldiss, “Book Fare,” SF Impulse, 1,11 (1967), 51–54 (pp. 51–52).

  26. Aldiss, “Book Fare,” pp. 52–53.

  27. See, e.g., William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy, rev. edn (New York: Delta, 1962); David Horowitz. The Free World Colos
sus: A Critique of American Foreign Policy in the Cold War (New York: Hill and Wang, 1965); Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–1945 (New York: Vintage, 1968); and Harry Magdoff, The Age of Imperialism: The Economics of US Foreign Policy (New York: Modern Reader, 1969).