Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (387 page)

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Copyright © 1992 by Ursula K. Le Guin; first appeared in
Omni
; from A FISHERMAN OF THE INLAND SEA AND OTHER STORIES; reprinted by permission of the author and the author’s agent, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.

Science fiction has much to teach us about the environment. Through exotic landscapes, alien terrains, and remote worlds, distant in both time and space, the genre as a whole demonstrates a variety of strategies for engaging with and making sense of nature. Works of science fiction that emphasize their environments both reflect our own cultural assumptions about nature and suggest how we should plan for environmental contingencies and potential catastrophes in the future, pointing to many types of environmental practice in need of immediate improvement. But environmental science fiction also accomplishes something even more significant than this. Not only does it function as a mirror that reflects how we relate to our environment, it is a technologically sophisticated mirror whose silver surface has the power to reshape both our environment and our attitudes toward it. Before examining some examples of environmental science fiction at work, however, it will be useful to clarify what the term
environmentalism
signifies in the first place.

At heart, environmentalism is a political category, one whose boundaries shift with each individual assessment of the following terms: nature, beauty, commodity, resource, and necessity. As such, environmentalism is hard to define, but a good place to start is to say that it signals an interest in promoting the health and well-being of natural spaces. Yet even this fairly broad definition is somewhat misleading, since environmentalism is not so much a unified, coherent movement as it is a diverse set of practices and attitudes. For example, it might be one environmentalist’s belief that nature is deserving of protection from human interference and conservation in its own right, while another might insist that human beings are a part of nature and that human activity should not be viewed so much an interference with nature as it should be considered as an inevitable fact of nature. Regardless of these competing viewpoints—strict conservation on the one hand, responsible resource management on the other—environmentalism might be best construed as an ongoing conversation about what constitutes nature, about tensions between nature as a commodity and spiritual resource, about the complexities of conservation, the consequences of technological progress, the agency of natural spaces, the role humans have within them, and the interconnectedness of all living and nonliving things. Additionally, environmental expression often involves the way exterior, outer spaces—and often, in the case of science fiction, outer space—have the ability to reflect, express, and inflect the interior sites of the self. Science fiction, with its variously beautiful, luminous, polluted, complicated, alien, abject, majestic, innocent, and perverse landscapes, brings all of these aspects of the ongoing conversation that is environmentalism into relief. A sampling from several science fiction classics will reveal these environmental complexities at work.

Frank Herbert’s classic science fiction novel
Dune
(1965) is an amazing book for many reasons, but it is especially impressive in this context, managing to touch upon every aspect of environmentalism mentioned above. On the desert world of Arrakis, also called Dune, the entire planet is at war over a valuable and rare commodity found only in the planet’s otherwise barren stretches of sand. This commodity, called spice, or mélange, is valuable for many reasons, not the least of which is that it makes space travel more efficient, by allowing those who ingest it to chart otherwise impossible navigational pathways through the stars. It is so valuable, in fact, that the imperial powers of other, wealthier planets have exclusive, clan-based contracts to mine the spice, regardless of the indigenous people and life-forms who call the desert planet home. Throughout the course of the novel, the Arrakeen desert people rebel, seize control of the precious commodity, sometimes by threatening to destroy it or actually destroying it, and effectively disrupt the machinery of the wealthy and technologically sophisticated imperial power that seeks to control them. At the same time that these environmental issues have importance in the diegetic world, which is to say the story world of the novel, they also illuminate the fraught, fragile power of our own natural spaces. Although
Dune
is set twenty thousand years in the future, in a remote solar system that has little in common with our own, the story of its contested desert spaces perhaps has a familiar ring. A reader interested in the tension between nature as a commodity and a sacred and spiritual space right here on Earth would do well to examine the entire series (six books in the original series, one film by David Lynch, and a three-part film series by John Harrison, not to mention seven new books from Kevin J. Anderson and Frank Herbert’s son, Brian Herbert). Yet Herbert’s Dune is only one example within a much larger constellation of works of science fiction within which the setting, background, landscape, and larger environment play an important role in both the development of the story and in the way in which the events in the story relate to the natural spaces of our very own Terra (Earth). Science fiction as a genre is filled with such examples, even in its earliest forms.

Consider the expression of environmental and evolutionary degradation in H. G. Wells’s famous novella,
The Time Machine
. In this book, a nameless narrator, the Time Traveler, builds a machine that carries him forward in time. He lights on a few time-places with his marvelous device, but it is when he lands in the year 802,701 AD that we get an insight into where we are headed as a species. In
The Time Machine
’s terrible future, mankind has continued to evolve in line with technological progression, but the division of labor has become completely polarized. On the surface of this future earth, a race of childlike people called the Eloi know nothing of technology. Instead, they play all day in a garden paradise, filled with delicious fruit, fragrant flowers, and shallow pools of water. Underneath the earth, however, a different race has also evolved: the Morlocks. Allergic to sunlight, the Morlocks create and make use of terrible machines, emerging from their underground caverns only at night, to feast on the flesh of the Eloi. In terms of environmentalism, Wells has imagined a future in which two of the most pressing issues of environmental practice—nature and technology—have become antagonistic. This state of affairs could not help but resonate with Wells’ reading public. At the time of this novel’s publication in 1895, late Victorian England had seen an incredible surge in the amount of technology in almost every aspect of manufacturing and production. It was also during this time that Charles Darwin laid down the foundations for what has become the science of evolution. In Wells’s novella, these two pressing issues of the day—technological progress and Darwinian evolution—are coupled in a masterful telling. Among many other things, his novel suggests that unless technology and nature can be put into a more harmonious relationship, their antagonism will spell the ruin of the human race.

Science fiction also has long tradition of expressing the vitality and agency of the natural world, especially in terms of the intelligence of its animals, its plants, and the many other sentient beings who defy easy categorization. Consider, for example, another masterpiece by H.G. Wells,
The Island of Dr. Moreau
, in which the mutilated, animal victims of Moreau’s experimentation have their vengeance upon their creator beneath the dense jungle canopy of the island. Consider Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein, where the monster moves easily in and out of the sublime landscapes that surround him. Consider Cordwainer Smith’s “The Game of Cat and Dragon” (1955) or Andre Norton’s “All Cats Are Gray” (1954), for two examples of mass-market, Golden Age science fiction in which human beings and other animals work together to fight an alien threat; Joan D. Vinge’s Snow Queen, winner of the Hugo award for best novel in science fiction in 1980, in which a ruthless queen slaughters intelligent sea creatures for their youth-giving properties; or Grant Morrison’s We3, a contemporary graphic novel (2004) in which domestic pets have been transformed by a military research lab into a lethal networked weapon. And in terms of plant-based intelligence, consider Pat Murphy’s disturbing and provocative “His Vegetable Wife” (1986), in which a man on an alien planet grows his own wife from a seedling, but who, to put it mildly, miscalculates her time of harvest; or, for an earlier example, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Rappaccini’s Daughter” (1844), in which a horticulturalist’s daughter has herself become a highly cultivated but poisonous plant. M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening (2008), another film, also marks an important moment in environmental science fiction, imagining what would happen if the plant life that covers our world—and with which we share our world—were to represent a singular intelligence and malicious intent. 

Science fiction also has much to teach us about ecological harmony and environmental interconnectedness. If the past twenty years have been dominated by conversations about plugging into and connecting with computational technology—again, something science fiction presaged and shaped with the cyberpunk subgenre—then current science fiction succeeds in demonstrating how people are plugged into the natural landscape, as well—to plants, to animals, to the earth, and to each other, in addition to high-tech cybernetic devices. James Cameron’s film Avatar (2009), for one example, provides a sumptuous, three-dimensional visual performance of the interconnectedness of life. This emphasis on the web of life is far from new in the annals of science fiction, however. The importance of interconnectivity and ecological unity is something Ursula K. LeGuin explores from an ecological, anthropological perspective in The Word for the World is Forest, a novella published in 1972; as does Orson Scott Card in his masterful Ender’s Game series (1985–2002), and Speaker for the Dead (1986), in particular, with its expression of the tensions and miscommunications between the indigenous beings of Lusitania and the human biologists who study them. Additionally, the concept of stewardship and responsibility towards our fellow beings on earth is something that science fiction foregrounds. David Brin’s Startide Rising (1983), for example, explores the way that human beings take responsibility for the tutelage and advancement of other intelligent species, including dolphins and chimpanzees, while his Uplift series as a whole makes manifest the obligation and interdependences all species have upon each other.

Finally, science fiction has a long tradition of creating sympathy between strange, exotic outer landscapes and the interior lives of those who inhabit them. This is a feature in every period of literary history, of course, but it achieves exquisite hyperbole in certain works of science fiction, perhaps because science fiction frequently distills the variations of landscape into one singular, defining feature. For a few examples of this, consider the ice planet of Hoth, the desert planet of Tatooine, and the swamps of Dagobah in the
Star Wars
Franchise (or the forest planet of the Forest people and the aerial aeries of the Hawk Men in
Flash Gordon
). In Ray Bradbury’s short story, “All Summer in a Day” (1954), for a literary example, a lonely Earth girl named Margot moves to the planet Venus, where it rains for seven years before giving one fleeting day of sunshine. Margot weeps with the rain, loses her color in her sadness, and is locked inside on the one day of sunshine while her cruel classmates revel in its warmth. Later, in Octavia Butler’s novel
Parable of the Sower
(1993), the protagonist is an empath whose emotional boundaries are as vulnerable and trespassed as the gated communities that shape the burnt, post-apocalyptic landscapes of Los Angeles. In other words, the sympathetic fallacy, which John Ruskin defined in the nineteenth century as the untenable alignment of the interior life of the protagonist with the nonhuman features of the environment, becomes in science fiction a powerful and scientifically substantiated relation.

In summary, science fiction has much to teach about the environment, not only in terms of the remote landscapes of alien planets. Through cautionary tales, vivid imagining, and expressive correspondence with the surrounding landscape, science fiction not only reflects and illuminates our own natural spaces, but quite possibly gives us the imaginative tools we need to reshape them, right here, right now, on Earth.

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Lisa Swanstrom
is an Assistant Professor of English at Florida Atlantic University. Her research interests include science fiction, fantasy, and (new) media. She is currently working on a book that considers digital simulations of nature in light of dystopian science fiction narratives.

(1926-2011)

The first woman to win a Hugo, at a time when science fiction was seen as very much a field for boys, Anne McCaffrey’s
Dragonriders of Pern
novels blended the “feel” of fantasy with the rigorous worldbuilding of science fiction in a way few others (Marion Zimmer Bradley comes to mind) have pulled off successfully. Like Robert A. Heinlein and Andre Norton, she also had a knack for writing young adult science fiction that adults also loved. These days she gets grouped with young adult fantasy writers (when we were talking about this book, she told me how grateful she was to J. K. Rowling for revitalizing that genre) but when she started writing, there was no such genre. People forget that “Weyr Search” originally sold to
Analog
, a hard SF market that wanted nothing to do with fantasy.

Many of the environments from her childhood show up in McCaffrey’s books. She was educated at an girls boarding school in Virginia, then a public high school in Montclair, New Jersey, and finally Radcliffe College (where she majored in Slavonic Languages and Literature) in 1947. She studied voice for nine years, performed in the first music circus in 1949, once directed a play, and worked for a record label, Liberty Music Shop. Music is a major theme running through many McCaffrey books (and the characters in the Harper Hall novels are musicians), and it’s a always a believable part of McCaffrey’s worlds.

McCaffrey was married in 1950 and sold her first story, “Freedom of the Race” to
Science Fiction Plus
in 1953. She didn’t publish much until after her children (the third was born in 1959) were older:
The Ship Who Sang
came out in 1961, but it was five years before the sequel appeared. Once “Weyr Search” was published to wide acclaim, she wrote much more prolifically.
Dragonflight
(1968) was the first of many best-selling Dragonriders novels.
Decision at Doona
(1969) would also spark several sequels, as did
The Crystal Singer
(1982) and many other works.

Divorced in 1970, McCaffrey emigrated to Ireland with her two younger children, where she lived in a house of her own design called Dragonhold-Underhill. In addition to writing, she ran a private livery stable and her horses were successful in Horse Trials and showjumping. While she used to attend many conventions, age and arthritis limited her travel in her later years. One of her sons, Todd McCaffrey, is also a genre writer.