Reduced Ecologies

Abstract

Science fiction novels from the 1970s to the present have set their plots on planets with limited or no biodiversity so as to explore to what extent environmental conditions shape human cultures and codes of ethics, and to what extent humans themselves shape these conditions. Presenting scenarios of biological scarcity, they recast central questions of environmental ethics in the context of a largely synthetic nature. At their most complex, they portray more-than-human democracies in which nonhumans are humans’ interlocutors rather than merely their resources.

Keywords:

• science fiction
• ecology
• scarcity
• species
• aliens

Notes

Suvin made this distinction in an essay originally published in 1973; more recently, he has rescinded it and redefined extrapolation as a subcategory of analogy: see Suvin (1995).

See Nadir, note 26 (2010: 52–3), and on the concept of relinquishment also Lawrence Buell (1995: 143–79).

Le Guin's protagonists are ‘human’ in the sense that they are evolutionarily related to the inhabitants of planet Earth through their shared ancestors, the Hainish, and in that they look and behave in ways that make them indistinguishable from normal humans to the reader. They are not, however, identical to humans from Earth, as Shevek's encounter with a Terran ambassador toward the end of the novel highlights.

I am here following Martin Gorke's distinction between the anthropocentric attribution of rights only to humans, the pathocentric transfer of rights to species perceived to have the ability to suffer in ways that resemble humans' suffering, the biocentric assignment of rights to a broader range of nonhuman species and the physiocentric or holistic inclusion of inanimate landscapes into the discourse of rights (1999: 190–200).

Walter Benn Michaels has taken SF authors sharply to task for equating the difference between biological species with that between races or cultures on Earth in his essay ‘Political Science Fictions’ (2000), arguing that such a strategy ultimately essentialises difference in just the way multiculturalists claim they seek to avoid, and that it bars due acknowledgment of shared humanness.

I have analysed Bova's and Robinson's engagement with environmental topics in their Martian trilogy in much greater detail in ‘Martian Ecologies and the Future of Nature’ (Heise, forthcoming).