Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction

by Gerry Canavan (Editor), Kim Stanley Robinson (Editor)

Contemporary visions of the future have been shaped by hopes and fears about the effects of human technology and global capitalism on the natural world. In an era of climate change, mass extinction, and oil shortage, such visions have become increasingly catastrophic, even apocalyptic. Exploring the close relationship between science fiction, ecology, and environmentalism, the essays in Green Planets consider how science fiction writers have been working through this crisis. Beginning with H. G. Wells and passing through major twentieth-century writers like Ursula K. Le Guin, Stanislaw Lem, and Thomas Disch to contemporary authors like Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, and Paolo Bacigalupi—as well as recent blockbuster films like Avatar and District 9—the essays in Green Planets consider the important place for science fiction in a culture that now seems to have a very uncertain future. The book includes an extended interview with Kim Stanley Robinson and an annotated list for further exploration of "ecological SF" and related works of fiction, nonfiction, films, television, comics, children's cartoons, anime, video games, music, and more.

Contributors include Christina Alt, Brent Bellamy, Sabine Höhler, Adeline Johns-Putra, Melody Jue, Rob Latham, Andrew Milner, Timothy Morton, Eric C. Otto, Michael Page, Christopher Palmer, Gib Prettyman, Elzette Steenkamp, Imre Szeman.

Genres: Science Fiction, Essays

299 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 9, 2014

About the author

Gerry Canavan is an associate professor in the English Department at Marquette University, specializing in 20th- and 21st-century literature. An editor at Extrapolation and Science Fiction Film and Television, he has also coedited Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (2014), The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction (2015), and The Cambridge History of Science Fiction (2019). His first monograph, Octavia E. Butler, appeared in 2016 in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series at University of Illinois Press.

Reviews

[Marie · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very dense literary criticism text. I had to read it slowly, with a highlighter in one hand and taking notes with the other.
I do think that there is an urge in literary criticism to hide meaning through complex sentence structures, many-layered references and jargon, as if they fear they won't be taken seriously or be thought to have done their work if they state things plainly.

Still, it was right up my alley and gave me lots of juicy thoughts. I even enjoyed the in-depth essays on stories I hadn't read (yet). Stories I had read I could see from a slightly different light... this was especially true in the essay on Solaris... I think I was too blinded by my own frustration with the treatment of the female lead to think about some of what Lem was doing there.

I plan to go back and go over my notes at a later date.

[Karl Bunker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Full disclosure: I received a free copy of this book in return for a review.

In an afterword to this book, which takes the form of an interview of Kim Stanley Robinson conducted by editor Gerry Canavan, Canavan asks, "What might the people of 2100, or 2200, think about a culture that consumed stories of their radically transformed world as entertainment, while simultaneously refusing to act in the material realm?"

A darned interesting question, and one that's typical of the sorts of issues looked at in this anthology of essays dealing with ecology-themed science fiction.

Being a collection of essays by different authors, the book isn't as coherent and unified as a single-author book would be, but it does present a range of ideas and perspectives on the book's subject, and most of these make for engaging reading.

Some high points:

Chapter 3, in which Gib Prettyman discusses the influence of Dowist thought on Ursula Le Guin's fiction and in particular on her views on ecology and utopian societies.

Adeline Johns-Putra examines "ecofeminism" and related issues in chapter 7, looking at the presumption by some theorists of the essential role of the feminine in ecological awareness and "caring." The chapter focusses largely on Maggie Gee's climate-change dystopia The Ice People.

In Chapter 9, Christopher Palmer looks at some examples of recent post-apocalypse fiction. I particularly enjoyed his excellent and insightful discussion of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake.

Chapter 10, by Eric C. Otto, presents an excellent examination of Paolo Bacigalupi's eco-dystopian fiction. Bacigalupi may be the most important name in this sub-genre of SF, and I found Otto's analyses to be thoughtful, intelligent and readable.

And as is to be expected, there are some lower points:

In chapter 8, Elzette Steenkamp looks at South African science fiction, and in particular at the novel Souvenir by Jane Rosenthal and the film District 9. While the chapter is fairly interesting, only one of those three topics, the novel Souvenir, has any real connection with ecology and environmentalism.

Chapter 12, by Timothy Morton, examines the movie Avatar in terms of the philosophies of Heidegger, Hume, Kant, Spinoza, Hegel, and a host of others. This makes for some of the densest writing in the book, and I'm afraid the chapter will have little value to readers who aren't used to slogging through hip-deep philosophy-lingo.

I considered the low point of the book to be Chapter 11, in which Brent Bellamy and Imre Szeman discuss Alan Weisman's 2007 book The World Without Us. They use muddled and overly dense language to present some downright silly ideas about the "real" environmental and philosophical meaning behind Weisman's book, for the most part presenting these ideas without a particle of supporting argument. I found the chapter an annoying exercise in flaccid thought pretentiously dressed up in turgid prose.

But overall the book is very good, and a fine contribution to its field. With environmentalism and climate change becoming ever more important issues in SF (as they are in the world) this book is pretty much a must-have for serious students of science fiction studies.

[Ken · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some of the essays are better constructed than others, but overall the content is solid, interesting, and well-argued.

[Simon B · Rating 3 out of 5]

A thoughtful collection of essays of varying quality. The worst was a convoluted piece by Timothy Morton who infuriatingly name-dropped various philosophers every second paragraph but otherwise said not all that much about Avatar. The best was Gerry Canavan's discussion with Kim Stanley Robinson about ecology and science fiction. A few other essays had good insights into aspects of Ursula Le Guin's, Stanislaw Lem's and Paolo Bacigalupi's fiction.

KSR: "I tend to use Marxist critical theory when thinking about history, ecology when thinking about the biosphere, and Buddhism when thinking cosmically or personally, although immediately when I say that I realize I often use all three in a slurry. My narrators often take 'the most scientific view' of everything, even metaphysics, because that leads to funny sentences. And thinking of science as a critical utopian leftist political action from its very beginning — something like the best Marxist praxis so far performed in the real world — is very provocative and stimulating. Likewise thinking of science as a devotional practice, in which the universe is the sacred object of study. It can be almost a scissors - rock - paper thing among the three. The enjambments have been good for my books."

[Gemma Field · Rating 3 out of 5]

The quality of essays in this collection varies wildly, but Gerry Canavan's solid scholarship brings it all together. His hilarious one-line summaries of the canon at the end of the collection should be given their own book.

[Jonna Higgins-Freese · Rating 3 out of 5]

I got some interesting ideas for other books to read, but much of it was just too theoretical/academic for me to find very useful for my purposes.

A few interesting passages:

From "Life after People,": "The capacity (or rather, incapacity) of collective social amelioration lies at the heart of the endeavor called critical theory, which has since its inauguration in the work of the Frankfurt School been nothing if not an elaboration of the characteristics of late modernity that have blocked or impeded political possibility."

Well, that is certainly the clearest explanation I have ever seen of what critical theory is trying to do.

" One of the founding limits of narratives like Weisman's . . . is that while they attend to consequences of the dark side of the Enlightenment, they remain enraptured by the capacities of reason and fact to generate collective action; they see environmental destruction as a misstep in a story of progress rather than as a necessary outcome of that self-same science that is so apt at diagnosing the problem if not generating any solution (other than the elimination of humanity _tout court_."

This strikes me as the usual simplistic environmental fetishization of the evils of modern/industrial society, by people who are only alive to make that critique because they've taken antibiotics.

"Lauren Berlant's analysis of the affective dyanmics of 'cruel optimism' generates an explanation for the above impasse. The very way in which contemporary life is lived out points to the affective limits of science faction and, indeed, of other dominant modes of environmental narrative, in generating the change they so desire. For Berlant, contemporary narratives of futue change open up the optimistic 'possibility that the habits of a history might _not_ be reproduced.' They do so, however, in a way that, instead of pushing toward a historical break, generates a desire for a 'reanchoring in the symptom's predictability.'" (199)