This is Planet Earth
Examining literature and cinema's ongoing fascination with tales of ecological disaster and global apocalypse
In 2004 Modern Art Oxford staged an installation of Mike Nelson’s ‘Triple Bluff Canyon’. On the upper floor of the gallery a steep hill of sand had been built. On top of this dune was a replica of an old wooden shack, based on Robert Smithson’s ‘Partially Buried Woodshed’ (1970). The whole was designed to create anxiety and uncertainty. Yet visitors to the exhibition lingered on the edge of the sand, reluctant to return to reality. The sand cast a spell. The visitors may have been reminded of pleasant days at the seaside in their childhood. This impression was reinforced by people who, entering the shack above, waved cheerfully to those of us down on the fringe of the dune, as though on holiday.
How we read environments depends on our own situation. For instance, those who live in filthy environments long for clean places, which may vary, given that a Western city may be muckier than a village in a dwindling Amazonian forest. Thomas More’s ‘Utopia’ (1516) talks of the selling of meat in a market-place where ‘the filth and ordure thereof is clean washed away in the running river […] lest the air by the stench thereof, infected and corrupt, should cause pestilent diseases’. By such imaginings we learn something of Utopia but perhaps more about the state of London in the time of Henry VIII. These days we would hesitate to pollute More’s running river. Similarly we would be unhappy to read the notice that once stood on a pier on the Isle of Wight saying: ‘Do not drop your rubbish on the pier. Throw it in the sea.’ Sensibilities change with technology.
Global warming has made ecologists of us all. (I first read the word ‘ecology’ in one of those scorned 15-cent Yankee science-fiction magazines such as ‘Future Science Fiction, Amazing Stories and Analog’.) The tsunami which, in December 2004, laid waste to vast expanses of the countries around the Indian Ocean – Indonesia in particular – has brought about more painful considerations regarding mankind’s responsibilities for overturning the planetary balance we once understood under the all-embracing name of Gaia. Gaia now rocks on her throne. Throne-rocking, of course, has a long history. In 1987 that assiduous researcher Paul Brians published his ‘Nuclear Holocausts’, in which he lists and describes over 800 novels and stories concerning the world – or, if not the world, then civilization – destroyed by atomic or nuclear weapons. Brians draws our attention to Walter M. Miller’s triple-jointed novel ‘A Canticle for Leibowitz’ (1959). Here a new dark age has followed nuclear war; the Catholic Church revives an old role as a preserver of ancient knowledge. The book, which grew out of the science-fiction magazine ‘Fantasy & Science Fiction’ (founded in 1949), in which it originally appeared as a series of short stories, became very popular. Perhaps its great attraction was that it suggests that civilization can be rebuilt after a nuclear war. Many vaguely similar stories, lacking Miller’s skills, are satirical in intent or else romantic in nature, presumably written by authors who wish to see the US or elsewhere revert to a wild state. These we may classify as constituting the ‘Cowboys of Doom’ stable of writing and are hardly worth further thought. I recall Robert Adams’ ‘Horseclans’ (1975–88) series of paperbacks, in which the author longs for all of the US to turn into the old Wild West. Barbarism is a negation of justice and all that is civilized.
A defence of much bad or puerile writing in the early days of science-fiction magazines was that it predicted the future. The generic signifier for this kind of thing could be seen on paperbacks of the 1950s: in front of a needle-like silver space rocket stands a blonde woman in a tight-fitting space suit. And for those who had not quite got the message a terrible green thing would lurk in the background. The repetitive cover announces that it is there for readers who want to read what they have already read, with only minor variations – blue monsters instead of green, say. However, this kind of writing could not predict the future and did not seriously attempt to do so, for where are the novels about global warming? An interesting scenario taking us beyond this current threat is contained in Noel Hodson’s novel ‘AD 2516 – After Global Warming’ (2005). In Hodson’s world great storms abound, but the earth is returning to its calmer patterns, possibly because populations have declined. People have died, yet science survives: ‘Joe pointed down at the gleaming white structure in the middle of the ocean. It was a vast complex disc encircling a placid lagoon. The outside walls soared hundreds of feet into the air like castle ramparts, straight out of the grey-blue turbulent Atlantic […] the walls sported thousands of windows and storm-proof balconies, rising to dizzying towers and sculpted pinnacles. Everywhere, there were wind generators of all sizes, spinning in the relentless Atlantic breeze.’
Brian W. Aldiss
