Green Planets
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Of course, to interpret most invasion stories of SF’s pulp era as critical of Western progress requires reading against the grain, since their evident message is the fearlessness and ingenuity of Euro-American peoples when confronted by hostile forces. The magazine Astounding Science Fiction, during its 1940s golden age, operated under a philosophy that Brian Stableford and David Pringle identify as “human chauvinism,” by the terms of which “humanity was destined to get the better of any and all alien species.”9 Editor John W. Campbell saw the extraterrestrial expansion of the human race not only as a logical extrapolation of the exploratory impulse of Western civilization but also explicitly as an outlet for martial aggression; as he remarked in a letter to A. E. Van Vogt, when “other planets are opened to colonization … we’ll have peace on earth—and war in heaven!”10 One of the few tales of successful “foreign” invasion published during Astounding’s heyday was Robert Heinlein’s Sixth Column (1941), where the invaders are not aliens from space but a Pan-Asiatic horde that occupies the United States, only to be undermined and eventually defeated by an underground scientific elite masquerading as a popular religion; reverse colonization is thus foiled and the Westward trend of empire reaffirmed. Sixth Column is a forerunner of postwar tales of communist menace, such as Heinlein’s own The Puppet Masters (1951), in which slug-like parasites seek to brainwash the U.S. citizenry but ultimately prove no match for the native resourcefulness and righteous rage of humankind: “They made the mistake of tangling with the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting—and ablest—form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can’t be tamed.”11
The cinema of the 1950s was filled with similar scenarios of sinister alien infiltration and dogged human resistance that basically allegorized the U.S. struggle with global communism and usually ended with the defeat of the invaders. Yet close readings of these stories reveal a strong undercurrent of unease beneath the bland surface confidence in American values: for example, in Invaders from Mars (1953), as I have argued in a previous essay, “the paranoia about alien invasion and takeover may merely serve to deflect anxieties about how seamlessly militarist power has inscribed itself into the suburban American landscape.”12 Similar disquiets can be perceived in films that depict literal communist attacks and occupations, such as Invasion U.S.A. (1952), which is, as Cyndy Hendershot has shown, as much about fears of U.S. decadence and conformism as it is about Soviet perfidy.13 In other words, even invasion stories that valorize human (that is, Western) cunning and bravery may be troubled by doubts regarding the susceptibility to external incursions, the lurking rot at the imperial core that permits such brazen raids from the periphery.
By contrast with American treatments of the theme, which were pugnacious in their refusal to succumb to invasion, postwar British disaster stories had a distinctly elegiac tone, a quality of wistful resignation in the face of imperial decline. As Roger Luckhurst points out, British tales of catastrophe had “always addressed disenchantment with the imperialist ‘civilizing’ mission,” but 1950s versions, confronted with the ongoing collapse of the global empire, used the disaster plot as “a laboratory reconceiving English selfhood in response to traumatic depredations.”14 The popular novels of John Wyndham, such as The Day of the Triffids (1951) and The Kraken Wakes (1953), take refuge in pastoralist fantasy as Britain’s cities are overrun by marauding invaders, the imperial hegemon shrinking to beleaguered individual (or small-communal) sanctuaries. Brian W. Aldiss has coined the term “cosy catastrophe” to describe these sorts of plots, a category in which some have also placed the early fiction of John Christopher, though here, as Aldiss says, “the catastrophe loses its cosiness and takes on an edge of terror.”15 In Christopher’s The Death of Grass (1956) and The World in Winter (1962), there is no refuge from the crisis because the environment itself has grown hostile, stricken by a virus that kills off crops or the advent of a new ice age. The absence of an alien menace in these novels vitiates the possibility of heroic resistance, replacing it with an ethos of brute survivalism, whose long-term prospects are desperate and unpromising. The sense of imperial comeuppance is particularly strong in World in Winter, where Britons displaced by glacial expansion flee to Nigeria, only to be rudely treated by their former colonial subjects.
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 toward 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.”16 In other words, the very mind-set that produced imperial hegemony—the confidence in reason, disciplined deployment of techno-science, 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.”17 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.18 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 countercultural 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 techno-scientific 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. The most prominent advocate for the New Wave among American commentators, Algis Budrys, responding to a laudatory review of the book by Judith Merril, attacked the novel as “pretentious, inconsistent, and sophomoric,” an insult to “the school of science fiction which takes hope in science and in Man.”19 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”20—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, modeled on the disaster stories of Ballard, wherein “characters who regard the physical universe as a mysterious and arbitrary place, and who wou
ld 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,24 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 naïve optimism.25 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, though Budrys doesn’t 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 unadultered shot of pure bracing gloom.” 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 postimperial 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 postwar 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 U.S. 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 postwar 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 United States 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,”31 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,32 to the uncontrollable dissemination of escaped laboratory animals in H. G. Wells’s 1904 novel Food of the Gods.33 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.”34 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.35
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.36 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 England37—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.”38 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.”39
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, 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. 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.
SF, in short, had for too long been an uncritical cheerleader for the social engineering of nature emanating from a narrow technocratic mind-set 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 visi
ons 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 six-hundred-foot-high 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 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 amid 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 interoffice memos blandly puts it.43 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.44