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Plants in Science Fiction: Speculative Vegetation
Plants have played key roles in science fiction novels, graphic novels, and film. John Wyndham’s triffids, Algernon Blackwood’s willows, and Han Kang’s sprouting woman are just a few examples. Plants surround us, sustain us, pique our imaginations, and inhabit our metaphors – but in many ways they remain opaque. The scope of their alienation is as broad as their biodiversity. And yet, literary reflections of plant-life are driven, as are many threads of science fictional inquiry, by the concerns of today. Plants in Science Fiction is the first-ever collected volume on plants in science fiction. Its original essays argue that plant-life in SF is transforming our attitudes toward morality, politics, economics, and cultural life at large; questioning and shifting our understandings of institutions, nations, borders, and boundaries; erecting – and dismantling – new visions of utopian and dystopian futures.
272 pages, Hardcover
First published April 28, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
October 8, 2020
Oh, it took me forever to get through this. I was quite looking forward to it too! As a botanist and a speculative fiction writer myself, this should have been right up my alley. Alas, I could not get enthused. There were some genuinely interesting chapters in here. I particularly liked Jerry Määttä's chapter on John Wyndham, T.S. Miller's chapter on "Vegetable Love" and Alison Sperling's chapter on Jeff VanderMeer, but in all honesty a lot of the book blurred together for me. The main points are fair enough: that plants can be re-imagined to illustrate different forms of existence, and different relationships between species; that blurring boundaries between plants and non-plants (particularly humans) is a valuable way of illustrating this; and that Michael Marder requires substantial referencing. On these points the authors agree, and so do I. Yet despite their often very different approaches to said points, reading them reiterated over and over does come to be repetitive. Hence the blurring.
December 28, 2023
Un recorrido por la ciencia ficción botánica anglosajona y de cómo el 'reino plantae' termina (gracias al antropocentrismo) colindando con lo weird y sus derivados. La bibliografía de los artículos: increíble.
June 20, 2021
The contributing authors present a deep look at plants, generally in prose science fiction. It definitely does what it sets out to do, though as another reviewer noted, it often feels kind of repetitive.
The book is divided into three parts: one section on plants regarded as abjection (the parts we humans would want to cut off), which in particular frames plants as representatives of Western colonialism. One part on plants as affinity, generally emphasizing plants as repressed desire. And one section on plants as accord, coming to terms with plants in various ways. There are ten essays in all; each is good on its own terms, though the more general ones with multiple texts tend to blend together, as there's a lot of repetition in which texts get looked at. I think that's the chief disappointment of the book, on my end, that its scope of science fiction is a little narrow. By limiting themselves to prose science fiction, they're leaving a lot on the table media-wise; give me a look at plants in videogames (Plants vs Zombies), film (Little Shop of Horrors), comics (Poison Ivy, Swamp Thing), children's literature, boardgames, and so forth.
In terms of the quality of individual essays, I think I waited too long between finishing the reading and writing the review. Shelley Saguaro's discussion of Cthulhu and plant tentacles is interesting (though also a reminder that we can add manga to the collection of texts left unexamined), as is Miller's rundown of desire and plants in chapter 5. Yogi Hale Hendlin's and Graham J. Murphy's respective chapters gave me new books to read, in the form of Jitterbug Perfume and Queen City Jazz. I liked Alison Sperling's "Weird and Sporous Bodies in Jeff VanderMeer's Fiction," though I was really disappointed that the mushrooms of City of Saints and Madmen didn't get its time in the sun (or its space in the dark and dank, as the case may be).
It does what it sets out to do, and it's clearly a useful resource to those interested in the subject. All the essays are readable and approachable in their own right. But it's hard to feel like there wasn't potential for more (which admittedly, is not the worst feeling to finish a book with).
The book is divided into three parts: one section on plants regarded as abjection (the parts we humans would want to cut off), which in particular frames plants as representatives of Western colonialism. One part on plants as affinity, generally emphasizing plants as repressed desire. And one section on plants as accord, coming to terms with plants in various ways. There are ten essays in all; each is good on its own terms, though the more general ones with multiple texts tend to blend together, as there's a lot of repetition in which texts get looked at. I think that's the chief disappointment of the book, on my end, that its scope of science fiction is a little narrow. By limiting themselves to prose science fiction, they're leaving a lot on the table media-wise; give me a look at plants in videogames (Plants vs Zombies), film (Little Shop of Horrors), comics (Poison Ivy, Swamp Thing), children's literature, boardgames, and so forth.
In terms of the quality of individual essays, I think I waited too long between finishing the reading and writing the review. Shelley Saguaro's discussion of Cthulhu and plant tentacles is interesting (though also a reminder that we can add manga to the collection of texts left unexamined), as is Miller's rundown of desire and plants in chapter 5. Yogi Hale Hendlin's and Graham J. Murphy's respective chapters gave me new books to read, in the form of Jitterbug Perfume and Queen City Jazz. I liked Alison Sperling's "Weird and Sporous Bodies in Jeff VanderMeer's Fiction," though I was really disappointed that the mushrooms of City of Saints and Madmen didn't get its time in the sun (or its space in the dark and dank, as the case may be).
It does what it sets out to do, and it's clearly a useful resource to those interested in the subject. All the essays are readable and approachable in their own right. But it's hard to feel like there wasn't potential for more (which admittedly, is not the worst feeling to finish a book with).
March 6, 2025
Literature naval gazing, I was really hoping they would have had at least one botanist to write an essay. Mostly just emotional responses to obscure and not so obscure science fiction literature that have at least a plant mention in them. If you want a literary analysis of how vines act as symbols representing sex or colonization or who knows this is the book for you. No wonder they want to cut university funding.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews