This essay was published in Arc, a sadly short-lived spin-off from New Scientist, in 2014. Arc was a wild blend of short stories, essays, criticism and general interestingness, created and edited by Simon Ings. You can buy back issues on Zinio, if you want to see it in its full glory.
In this essay, I tried to articulate why it is that so many of my deeper feelings about nature and the environment are rooted in fantasy literature, not in science fiction - even though you might think SF was the genre more suited to dealing with such "realistic" topics.
There are bits of it I would write differently now, so in a few places I've inserted notes in square brackets. Also, things have changed in the last decade: subgenres like cli-fi and solarpunk were less prominent in 2014. So in some ways the argument might be out of date. But on the other hand, I was mostly writing about the prominent "entry texts" in the genres, as those are both the most widely known and responsible for setting the tone. You can judge for yourself whether there's still anything worthwhile here, 10 years on.
In this essay, I tried to articulate why it is that so many of my deeper feelings about nature and the environment are rooted in fantasy literature, not in science fiction - even though you might think SF was the genre more suited to dealing with such "realistic" topics.
There are bits of it I would write differently now, so in a few places I've inserted notes in square brackets. Also, things have changed in the last decade: subgenres like cli-fi and solarpunk were less prominent in 2014. So in some ways the argument might be out of date. But on the other hand, I was mostly writing about the prominent "entry texts" in the genres, as those are both the most widely known and responsible for setting the tone. You can judge for yourself whether there's still anything worthwhile here, 10 years on.
The Hobbiton set in New Zealand (Credit: Joe Ross, CC-by-SA-2.0)
The nature of the catastrophe
Science fiction struggles to portray environmental concerns; fantasy brings them to life. Michael Marshall wonders why talking trees speak more eloquently than hard facts
Everyone knows the environment is in trouble. The climate is changing, species are going extinct, and vulnerable people are paying the price. It’s part of our narrative as a society: we are screwing up the planet, and we need to stop before we screw ourselves.
You wouldn’t know any of this from science fiction. SF has, with a few exceptions, ignored climate change and the ways in which a rich biosphere helps to sustain our society. The exceptions (we’ll get to them) do portray environmentalism extremely well, but they are not entry texts: new readers must work their way through the genre before they reach them.
Environmentalism and science fiction both have their roots in the nineteenth century [Dear Past Mike, this sentence needs a qualifier. People have been worrying about the environment for millennia, and the roots of SF run extremely deep.]. The period that saw the publication of science fiction’s formative texts, Frankenstein and The War of the Worlds, also saw William Blake coin the phrase “dark Satanic mills” in reference to the hideous pollution created by the Industrial Revolution. Later, the British physicist John Tyndall produced the first real evidence of the greenhouse effect, demonstrating via ingenious experiments that gases like water vapour and carbon dioxide trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. [<cough> Eunice Foote </cough>]
Science fiction exploded onto the popular consciousness in the middle of the twentieth century, driven first by pulp magazines and later by B-movies. By then some scientists were already concerned about climate change, warning that if humanity kept emitting carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels, Earth might become dangerously hot. Concerns loomed large about the destruction of wilderness, the extinction of species and pollution. The milestone came in 1962, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a grim but lyrical warning about the reckless use of pesticides on farms.
These were some of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. Science fiction ignored them. The great early authors like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke were largely concerned with space travel, artificial intelligence and other forms of computer technology, and with what a future society might look like. Asimov’s Foundation series, published in the 1950s, is a long disquisition on how to run a society so that it survives in the long term, but environmental degradation, one of the principal threats that can collapse a society, doesn’t feature.
[If I were to write this now, I would tweak that last sentence to make clear that climate change can act as a stressor on societies, but how that society (especially its elite) chooses to respond is a huge factor in whether or not a collapse (whatever that means) happens.]
In the decade after Silent Spring, Clarke produced two important works - 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama – and Heinlein published The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. All are classics, asking huge questions about our place in the universe and how a space-based society might work; but it’s fair to say that Silent Spring might as well not have been written. In fact Heinlein’s book expressed a libertarian philosophy, preaching extreme individual freedom and an extremely reduced state. Many other technofuturist authors pushed similar philosophies, until the courageous individual struggling against the cruel, repressive state became a recurring theme in the genre. In fiction, as in the real world, libertarianism tends to ignore environmental concerns – or denies their validity – because they pose an insoluble problem for anyone trying to design a libertarian utopia. It’s hard to imagine how to halt society’s emissions of greenhouse gases if you don’t even admit the existence of society.
One exceptional science fiction author did tackle the environment. The result, Frank Herbert’s Dune, is (for my money) the best science fiction novel ever written. It contains plentiful genre tropes, from faster-than-light travel to advanced weapons technology. But its breakthrough was to create an entire planetary ecology and then show how people lived within it.
The desert world of Arrakis has almost no water, so the native Fremen have been forced to adopt extreme methods of water conservation. They wear “stillsuits” that prevent them losing moisture to the air and even have a taboo against crying. In later novels, the Fremen gather enough water to change the planet’s climate, and Arrakis experiences rain for the first time. But this comes at a high price: the rain is lethal to the giant sandworms, which produce the lucrative spice that underpins the economy. So, in a bid to improve their environment, the people of Arrakis damage it and threaten their own livelihoods.
In the wake of Dune, science fiction had a decade of strong interest in the environment. In 1966, Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! delivered a stern warning of the dangers of overpopulation, portraying a nightmarish future New York City that is overcrowded and chronically short of food. [Your regularly scheduled note that fears about overpopulation are at best wildly overblown and often extremely misguided.] Its film adaptation Soylent Green, together with Silent Running, in which a botanist fights to preserve some of the last living plants in an artificial orbiting habitat, contributed to a short wave of environmentalist-themed SF at the movies. But this burst of interest wouldn’t last.
Instead the 1980s saw the rise of cyberpunk and a revival of space opera. Cyberpunk often took environmental destruction as read and made it part of the background: the future world of William Gibson’s Neuromancer has clearly taken a beating. It’s equally obvious that this wasn’t a book about the environment.
Iain Banks exploded onto the SF stage in the 1980s with his Culture novels. Set in an ultra-technological communist utopia, the books were unusually thoughtful space operas that asked tough moral questions, often about whether advanced societies have the right to interfere with the more primitive. The series helped establish a template for many later authors like Alastair Reynolds and Charles Stross. Strangely, though, for a writer so vocally “green” in interviews and in his personal life, Banks rarely worked environmental questions into his fiction.
The one genre that has really aced environmentalism is the one that has, on the face of it, the least to do with harsh reality. From The Lord of the Rings to Game of Thrones, fantasy has conveyed the threat of environmental destruction in a way SF never has.
Tolkien himself denied that his tale of hobbits and their quest to destroy the One Ring was about anything in particular. In his foreword to the book he said that, while it was enriched by his experiences and ideas, he didn’t like to write allegories, and preferred “history, true or feigned”. So one shouldn’t take The Lord of the Rings as an environmentalist tract, any more than it is an allegory for the second world war. But it does contain a wealth of key environmentalist ideas, and even foreshadows some modern debates.
Most obviously, the book portrays a clash between heavy industry and the desire to preserve nature. Sauron’s forces pollute their home, leaving it a barren wasteland. One character states that Sauron “can torture and destroy the very hills”, and the Dark Lord’s stronghold of Mordor is a vivid portrayal of a collapsed, polluted ecosystem. The subplot about the wizard Saruman, who cuts down a forest to build facilities for his army, and his defeat by the talking trees known as Ents, develops this theme. The Ents’ final decision, to recolonise the area razed by Saruman, is a textbook example of rewilding, in which a landscape altered by humans is restored to a wild state by reintroducing long-lost plants and animals. We can be confident Tolkien intended this fanciful-sounding interpretation: in his foreword he complains, “The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten”.
But there is more: the people of Middle Earth have to find ways to coexist with nature, just as we do. Today, most countries measure their success in terms of Gross Domestic Product: how much money they have made. But there is a growing push towards new measures that focus on the wellbeing of people and the environment. There is no point having lots of money if everyone is miserable and hungry. Tolkien understood this: in the book’s penultimate chapter, Saruman takes over the hobbits’ homeland, the Shire, and converts it from a bucolic paradise to a ravaged industrial backlot. He does this largely out of spite, and indeed there’s no benefit to anyone: as one hobbit notes, the villains install a new mechanised mill to increase efficiency, but there is no point as the old mill was quite fast enough to grind enough corn for everyone. The Shire has made technological and economic progress, but all this does is foul the environment, and make its inhabitants less happy.
With all these proto-environmentalist themes in The Lord of the Rings, it’s no wonder it was taken up by the burgeoning hippy movement in the 1960s – to Tolkien’s acute embarrassment. (The San Francisco free-love scene was hardly his intended audience.) But it’s striking, the extent to which these themes recur in other fantasy classics of the twentieth century.
Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy was published in the late 60s and early 70s. Written for older children, it follows a wizard named Ged from his initial training to his time as chief wizard, when he must defend the Earthsea archipelago from a seemingly world-ending evil.
As in many of her books, Le Guin uses Taoist ideas about how to live one’s life, with a strong focus on letting things be and refraining from action unless it is absolutely necessary. This is spelled out early in the first book, A Wizard of Earthsea, when Ged is apprenticed to a wizard named Ogion and finds that his tutor hardly ever does magic. This frustrates Ged, “for when it rained Ogion would not even say the spell that every weatherworker knows, to send the storm aside.” Clouds are comically shoved from side to side by neighbouring wizards, none of whom want to get wet. “But Ogion let the rain fall where it would,” and simply takes shelter, reluctant to change the path of the storm in case he inadvertently causes something far more serious. Nowadays we know that human interference in the climate can create more extreme storms, yet we keep pressing planet Earth’s buttons willy-nilly. Ogion seems wiser than ever.
Restoring the balance of nature is something the genre returns to just as often as it returns to magic swords and dragons. Fantasy authors obsess over the notion of evil as a pollutant. Hating everything that is beautiful, the villainous Lord Foul of Stephen Donaldson’s ten-book Thomas Covenant series, begun in the late 1970s, creates monsters and spews toxins into The Land. [Yes, I know these books are hugely problematic for (among other things) their portrayal of rape, not to mention Donaldson's, er, overcooked prose style.]
In the second Covenant trilogy, Lord Foul deploys a piece of black magic known as the Sunbane, a malevolent aura that surrounds the Sun and causes paroxysmic environmental changes. In rapid succession, The Land suffers drought, fertility, pestilence and rain, the changes coming too swiftly and violently for many of its inhabitants to adapt. Anyone wanting to get a sense of what it would be like to live in a world suffering rapid climate change should go read The Wounded Land. It is far from literally correct, but it is incomparably vivid.
Today’s most successful fantasy series is George R R Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, adapted for television as Game of Thrones. [Obviously, I wrote this before season eight came out] The series is known for its rich political intrigue and “realistic” approach to its pseudo-medieval setting. But it’s telling that even in this tale of warring kings, the biggest threat is environmental. In the world of Westeros, seasons last for years, and the story plays out in the run-up to a brutal winter in which the snows are expected to fall hundreds of feet thick, causing everyone to freeze to death. That’s if the ice zombies that only come out in winter don’t get them first (and of course assuming that Martin ever gets around to finishing the thing). In Martin’s world, political leaders squabble endlessly over power and money while in the background a changing climate threatens to kill everyone. Sound familiar?
There are other elements in fantasy that are innately environmentalist. The use of anthropomorphic nature is one: Tolkien’s personified trees, with their comical slow speech, no doubt help many young readers to love woodland. They certainly had that effect on me. The use of talking animals, whether it’s Le Guin’s aloof dragons or the talking rabbits in Watership Down, also ensures that the reader starts to care about nature, almost without realising it. This is most effective when the anthropomorphised organisms are still recognisably themselves: Tolkien’s Ents are extremely tree-ish in their behaviour and manner, for all that they can talk and walk; it’s an easy leap from liking Ents to liking real trees.
Many fantasies hark back to a distant past when their world was dominated by other creatures, before the advent of humans. Many of the trees in A Song of Ice and Fire’s Westeros are carved with faces, which relate in some nebulous way to old gods that have long since disappeared with the rise of human society. Humans in fantasy are often interlopers in a wondrous landscape, who don’t know what they’re doing and may unwittingly harm their world. Concepts like stewardship, and responsibility for nature, emerge naturally from this.
Fantasy succeeds by expressing these elemental truths about humanity’s relationship with nature, rather than through realistic depictions of genuine environmental problems. After all, metaphor is often more vivid than straight exposition, however beautifully delivered. That’s why the Ents’ assault on Isengard can still move me to joyful tears, over two decades after I first read it. I know that trees can’t literally do that, but it’s an exaggerated version of something I would dearly like to see happen: for Earth’s wild areas to retake some of the land that humanity has sprawled onto and despoiled.
Can science fiction offer any competition to these vivid images? James Cameron’s Avatar – at time of writing still the most financially successful film in history – did try. Avatar is a straightforward environmentalist parable, in which human miners dig for a rare mineral in the pristine forest of an alien world, while eco-conscious natives fight back. [Hmm, not sure about "natives": it has a colonialist ring. "Indigenous peoples" would be better]
The film certainly took environmentalism to a mass audience, and the astoundingly detailed ecosystem of Pandora makes for a vivid experience. The trouble is, the film articulates an out-of-date “hair-shirt” version of environmentalism. The only way to live in harmony with the Pandoran ecosystem, it seems, is to abandon advanced technology and return to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Really? It wasn’t possible to mine for the mineral in a slightly more sensitive way, without blowing up the natives’ home tree? Avatar suggests that any damage to the ecosystem, even the smallest interference, is a bad thing, and that modern technology and the environment cannot coexist. If Cameron really believes that, he should refrain from making big-budget movies. At any rate, much of the environmentalist movement has moved on from this sort of thinking. You can now find greens like Mark Lynas arguing furiously in favour of nuclear power, because it produces lots of energy without releasing greenhouse gases. Avatar, for all its visual brilliance, was obsolete even when it came out.
In the book world, there is a movement (or at least, a number of authors who critics have lumped together and called a movement) called biopunk, with a strong environmental emphasis. The most successful example is Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, set in a Bangkok where sea levels have risen and genetically-modified organisms run wild. Bacigalupi shows how environmental change has affected society – but it’s a grim book, and long, not for science-fiction newbies.
SF’s environmentalist figurehead is Kim Stanley Robinson. His Mars trilogy is one of the pinnacles of modern science fiction, and its story of ecologists terraforming Mars should be read by everyone with an interest in the environment (which is to say, everyone). Robinson tackles everything from man’s relationship with nature to environmental economics, and does it all with élan. ["man's relationship", ugh] More recently, his less-successful Science in the Capital series is about US government scientists trying to stop climate change. [Robinson has since published Aurora and The Ministry for the Future, both of which tackle environmental issues.]
Robinson is going to go down as one of science fiction’s greats, but he is not a gateway author. Only a fraction of fans will get past the allure of full-on space opera and find their way to someone like Kim Stanley Robinson. By contrast, most people’s introduction to adult fantasy is likely to be either The Lord of the Rings or – nowadays – A Song of Ice and Fire, and the environmentalist themes are in place from the start. The beginner texts may not receive the same critical attention as more sophisticated works, but they are more influential; these are the stories people read while they’re young.
Does SF have an inherent disadvantage when it comes to portraying environmentalism? Maybe, but there are a few things its practitioners might bear in mind. First, any novel that’s set anything more than a few decades into the future has to include the effects of climate change. It’s ridiculous not to. You can make all the cute predictions about artificial intelligence you like: if you set your story in 2100 and don’t at least give lip-service to extreme weather and an ice-free Arctic, your imagined future will be irrelevant. It would be like a science fiction writer of the early twentieth century deciding, without explanation, to imagine a futuristic society without computers or space travel.
Some of the techniques of fantasy aren’t really available to science fiction authors. It’s hard within science fiction to personify nature (although Avatar did give it a shot). SF authors, being oh-so-rational, wouldn’t dream of anthropomorphising a tree – and then they have the devil’s own job making the trees matter. Shorn of the ability to walk and talk, greenery’s a poor protagonist. [I didn't anticipate Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series, which among other things personifies slime moulds.]
But perhaps SF authors could trust the real science a bit more. Most ecologists, for instance, don’t talk much about the beauty of wilderness, but about “ecosystem services”: the things that ecosystems like forests do for us that we don’t appreciate until they’re gone. For instance, forests clean dirt out of the rivers that flow through them, ensuring that people living downstream have access to clean water. When you take that into account, preserving the forest stops being about having a nice place to go for a walk, and becomes a health issue. Frank Herbert used this idea in Dune half a century ago, but it hasn’t had much play since.
One big thing science fiction could do is ditch the libertarian fringe. SF has done so little on the environment because the genre can’t bear to let go of its libertarian ideals. It’s easier to transfer those ideals into outer space (where resources seem effectively limitless) than face up to the realities of life on the ground. From Heinlein on, the genre has pushed an extreme freedom ethic that rejects any notion that society has the right to curtail an individual’s actions, particularly if those actions are part of a free market.
This is an easy place to write from, but it’s a calamitous philosophy to live by. We often hear complaints that SF has lost its can-do optimism. Well, is it any wonder? In the hard, chromed, rugged, affectless shambles SF has made of the world, the introduction of some shamanic wonder - or failing that, a little love of place and people - would go a very long way.
Science fiction struggles to portray environmental concerns; fantasy brings them to life. Michael Marshall wonders why talking trees speak more eloquently than hard facts
Everyone knows the environment is in trouble. The climate is changing, species are going extinct, and vulnerable people are paying the price. It’s part of our narrative as a society: we are screwing up the planet, and we need to stop before we screw ourselves.
You wouldn’t know any of this from science fiction. SF has, with a few exceptions, ignored climate change and the ways in which a rich biosphere helps to sustain our society. The exceptions (we’ll get to them) do portray environmentalism extremely well, but they are not entry texts: new readers must work their way through the genre before they reach them.
Environmentalism and science fiction both have their roots in the nineteenth century [Dear Past Mike, this sentence needs a qualifier. People have been worrying about the environment for millennia, and the roots of SF run extremely deep.]. The period that saw the publication of science fiction’s formative texts, Frankenstein and The War of the Worlds, also saw William Blake coin the phrase “dark Satanic mills” in reference to the hideous pollution created by the Industrial Revolution. Later, the British physicist John Tyndall produced the first real evidence of the greenhouse effect, demonstrating via ingenious experiments that gases like water vapour and carbon dioxide trap heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. [<cough> Eunice Foote </cough>]
Science fiction exploded onto the popular consciousness in the middle of the twentieth century, driven first by pulp magazines and later by B-movies. By then some scientists were already concerned about climate change, warning that if humanity kept emitting carbon dioxide by burning fossil fuels, Earth might become dangerously hot. Concerns loomed large about the destruction of wilderness, the extinction of species and pollution. The milestone came in 1962, with the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, a grim but lyrical warning about the reckless use of pesticides on farms.
These were some of the most important scientific discoveries of the twentieth century. Science fiction ignored them. The great early authors like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke were largely concerned with space travel, artificial intelligence and other forms of computer technology, and with what a future society might look like. Asimov’s Foundation series, published in the 1950s, is a long disquisition on how to run a society so that it survives in the long term, but environmental degradation, one of the principal threats that can collapse a society, doesn’t feature.
[If I were to write this now, I would tweak that last sentence to make clear that climate change can act as a stressor on societies, but how that society (especially its elite) chooses to respond is a huge factor in whether or not a collapse (whatever that means) happens.]
In the decade after Silent Spring, Clarke produced two important works - 2001: A Space Odyssey and Rendezvous with Rama – and Heinlein published The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. All are classics, asking huge questions about our place in the universe and how a space-based society might work; but it’s fair to say that Silent Spring might as well not have been written. In fact Heinlein’s book expressed a libertarian philosophy, preaching extreme individual freedom and an extremely reduced state. Many other technofuturist authors pushed similar philosophies, until the courageous individual struggling against the cruel, repressive state became a recurring theme in the genre. In fiction, as in the real world, libertarianism tends to ignore environmental concerns – or denies their validity – because they pose an insoluble problem for anyone trying to design a libertarian utopia. It’s hard to imagine how to halt society’s emissions of greenhouse gases if you don’t even admit the existence of society.
One exceptional science fiction author did tackle the environment. The result, Frank Herbert’s Dune, is (for my money) the best science fiction novel ever written. It contains plentiful genre tropes, from faster-than-light travel to advanced weapons technology. But its breakthrough was to create an entire planetary ecology and then show how people lived within it.
The desert world of Arrakis has almost no water, so the native Fremen have been forced to adopt extreme methods of water conservation. They wear “stillsuits” that prevent them losing moisture to the air and even have a taboo against crying. In later novels, the Fremen gather enough water to change the planet’s climate, and Arrakis experiences rain for the first time. But this comes at a high price: the rain is lethal to the giant sandworms, which produce the lucrative spice that underpins the economy. So, in a bid to improve their environment, the people of Arrakis damage it and threaten their own livelihoods.
In the wake of Dune, science fiction had a decade of strong interest in the environment. In 1966, Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! delivered a stern warning of the dangers of overpopulation, portraying a nightmarish future New York City that is overcrowded and chronically short of food. [Your regularly scheduled note that fears about overpopulation are at best wildly overblown and often extremely misguided.] Its film adaptation Soylent Green, together with Silent Running, in which a botanist fights to preserve some of the last living plants in an artificial orbiting habitat, contributed to a short wave of environmentalist-themed SF at the movies. But this burst of interest wouldn’t last.
Instead the 1980s saw the rise of cyberpunk and a revival of space opera. Cyberpunk often took environmental destruction as read and made it part of the background: the future world of William Gibson’s Neuromancer has clearly taken a beating. It’s equally obvious that this wasn’t a book about the environment.
Iain Banks exploded onto the SF stage in the 1980s with his Culture novels. Set in an ultra-technological communist utopia, the books were unusually thoughtful space operas that asked tough moral questions, often about whether advanced societies have the right to interfere with the more primitive. The series helped establish a template for many later authors like Alastair Reynolds and Charles Stross. Strangely, though, for a writer so vocally “green” in interviews and in his personal life, Banks rarely worked environmental questions into his fiction.
The one genre that has really aced environmentalism is the one that has, on the face of it, the least to do with harsh reality. From The Lord of the Rings to Game of Thrones, fantasy has conveyed the threat of environmental destruction in a way SF never has.
Tolkien himself denied that his tale of hobbits and their quest to destroy the One Ring was about anything in particular. In his foreword to the book he said that, while it was enriched by his experiences and ideas, he didn’t like to write allegories, and preferred “history, true or feigned”. So one shouldn’t take The Lord of the Rings as an environmentalist tract, any more than it is an allegory for the second world war. But it does contain a wealth of key environmentalist ideas, and even foreshadows some modern debates.
Most obviously, the book portrays a clash between heavy industry and the desire to preserve nature. Sauron’s forces pollute their home, leaving it a barren wasteland. One character states that Sauron “can torture and destroy the very hills”, and the Dark Lord’s stronghold of Mordor is a vivid portrayal of a collapsed, polluted ecosystem. The subplot about the wizard Saruman, who cuts down a forest to build facilities for his army, and his defeat by the talking trees known as Ents, develops this theme. The Ents’ final decision, to recolonise the area razed by Saruman, is a textbook example of rewilding, in which a landscape altered by humans is restored to a wild state by reintroducing long-lost plants and animals. We can be confident Tolkien intended this fanciful-sounding interpretation: in his foreword he complains, “The country in which I lived in childhood was being shabbily destroyed before I was ten”.
But there is more: the people of Middle Earth have to find ways to coexist with nature, just as we do. Today, most countries measure their success in terms of Gross Domestic Product: how much money they have made. But there is a growing push towards new measures that focus on the wellbeing of people and the environment. There is no point having lots of money if everyone is miserable and hungry. Tolkien understood this: in the book’s penultimate chapter, Saruman takes over the hobbits’ homeland, the Shire, and converts it from a bucolic paradise to a ravaged industrial backlot. He does this largely out of spite, and indeed there’s no benefit to anyone: as one hobbit notes, the villains install a new mechanised mill to increase efficiency, but there is no point as the old mill was quite fast enough to grind enough corn for everyone. The Shire has made technological and economic progress, but all this does is foul the environment, and make its inhabitants less happy.
With all these proto-environmentalist themes in The Lord of the Rings, it’s no wonder it was taken up by the burgeoning hippy movement in the 1960s – to Tolkien’s acute embarrassment. (The San Francisco free-love scene was hardly his intended audience.) But it’s striking, the extent to which these themes recur in other fantasy classics of the twentieth century.
Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy was published in the late 60s and early 70s. Written for older children, it follows a wizard named Ged from his initial training to his time as chief wizard, when he must defend the Earthsea archipelago from a seemingly world-ending evil.
As in many of her books, Le Guin uses Taoist ideas about how to live one’s life, with a strong focus on letting things be and refraining from action unless it is absolutely necessary. This is spelled out early in the first book, A Wizard of Earthsea, when Ged is apprenticed to a wizard named Ogion and finds that his tutor hardly ever does magic. This frustrates Ged, “for when it rained Ogion would not even say the spell that every weatherworker knows, to send the storm aside.” Clouds are comically shoved from side to side by neighbouring wizards, none of whom want to get wet. “But Ogion let the rain fall where it would,” and simply takes shelter, reluctant to change the path of the storm in case he inadvertently causes something far more serious. Nowadays we know that human interference in the climate can create more extreme storms, yet we keep pressing planet Earth’s buttons willy-nilly. Ogion seems wiser than ever.
Restoring the balance of nature is something the genre returns to just as often as it returns to magic swords and dragons. Fantasy authors obsess over the notion of evil as a pollutant. Hating everything that is beautiful, the villainous Lord Foul of Stephen Donaldson’s ten-book Thomas Covenant series, begun in the late 1970s, creates monsters and spews toxins into The Land. [Yes, I know these books are hugely problematic for (among other things) their portrayal of rape, not to mention Donaldson's, er, overcooked prose style.]
In the second Covenant trilogy, Lord Foul deploys a piece of black magic known as the Sunbane, a malevolent aura that surrounds the Sun and causes paroxysmic environmental changes. In rapid succession, The Land suffers drought, fertility, pestilence and rain, the changes coming too swiftly and violently for many of its inhabitants to adapt. Anyone wanting to get a sense of what it would be like to live in a world suffering rapid climate change should go read The Wounded Land. It is far from literally correct, but it is incomparably vivid.
Today’s most successful fantasy series is George R R Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire, adapted for television as Game of Thrones. [Obviously, I wrote this before season eight came out] The series is known for its rich political intrigue and “realistic” approach to its pseudo-medieval setting. But it’s telling that even in this tale of warring kings, the biggest threat is environmental. In the world of Westeros, seasons last for years, and the story plays out in the run-up to a brutal winter in which the snows are expected to fall hundreds of feet thick, causing everyone to freeze to death. That’s if the ice zombies that only come out in winter don’t get them first (and of course assuming that Martin ever gets around to finishing the thing). In Martin’s world, political leaders squabble endlessly over power and money while in the background a changing climate threatens to kill everyone. Sound familiar?
There are other elements in fantasy that are innately environmentalist. The use of anthropomorphic nature is one: Tolkien’s personified trees, with their comical slow speech, no doubt help many young readers to love woodland. They certainly had that effect on me. The use of talking animals, whether it’s Le Guin’s aloof dragons or the talking rabbits in Watership Down, also ensures that the reader starts to care about nature, almost without realising it. This is most effective when the anthropomorphised organisms are still recognisably themselves: Tolkien’s Ents are extremely tree-ish in their behaviour and manner, for all that they can talk and walk; it’s an easy leap from liking Ents to liking real trees.
Many fantasies hark back to a distant past when their world was dominated by other creatures, before the advent of humans. Many of the trees in A Song of Ice and Fire’s Westeros are carved with faces, which relate in some nebulous way to old gods that have long since disappeared with the rise of human society. Humans in fantasy are often interlopers in a wondrous landscape, who don’t know what they’re doing and may unwittingly harm their world. Concepts like stewardship, and responsibility for nature, emerge naturally from this.
Fantasy succeeds by expressing these elemental truths about humanity’s relationship with nature, rather than through realistic depictions of genuine environmental problems. After all, metaphor is often more vivid than straight exposition, however beautifully delivered. That’s why the Ents’ assault on Isengard can still move me to joyful tears, over two decades after I first read it. I know that trees can’t literally do that, but it’s an exaggerated version of something I would dearly like to see happen: for Earth’s wild areas to retake some of the land that humanity has sprawled onto and despoiled.
Can science fiction offer any competition to these vivid images? James Cameron’s Avatar – at time of writing still the most financially successful film in history – did try. Avatar is a straightforward environmentalist parable, in which human miners dig for a rare mineral in the pristine forest of an alien world, while eco-conscious natives fight back. [Hmm, not sure about "natives": it has a colonialist ring. "Indigenous peoples" would be better]
The film certainly took environmentalism to a mass audience, and the astoundingly detailed ecosystem of Pandora makes for a vivid experience. The trouble is, the film articulates an out-of-date “hair-shirt” version of environmentalism. The only way to live in harmony with the Pandoran ecosystem, it seems, is to abandon advanced technology and return to the hunter-gatherer lifestyle. Really? It wasn’t possible to mine for the mineral in a slightly more sensitive way, without blowing up the natives’ home tree? Avatar suggests that any damage to the ecosystem, even the smallest interference, is a bad thing, and that modern technology and the environment cannot coexist. If Cameron really believes that, he should refrain from making big-budget movies. At any rate, much of the environmentalist movement has moved on from this sort of thinking. You can now find greens like Mark Lynas arguing furiously in favour of nuclear power, because it produces lots of energy without releasing greenhouse gases. Avatar, for all its visual brilliance, was obsolete even when it came out.
In the book world, there is a movement (or at least, a number of authors who critics have lumped together and called a movement) called biopunk, with a strong environmental emphasis. The most successful example is Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl, set in a Bangkok where sea levels have risen and genetically-modified organisms run wild. Bacigalupi shows how environmental change has affected society – but it’s a grim book, and long, not for science-fiction newbies.
SF’s environmentalist figurehead is Kim Stanley Robinson. His Mars trilogy is one of the pinnacles of modern science fiction, and its story of ecologists terraforming Mars should be read by everyone with an interest in the environment (which is to say, everyone). Robinson tackles everything from man’s relationship with nature to environmental economics, and does it all with élan. ["man's relationship", ugh] More recently, his less-successful Science in the Capital series is about US government scientists trying to stop climate change. [Robinson has since published Aurora and The Ministry for the Future, both of which tackle environmental issues.]
Robinson is going to go down as one of science fiction’s greats, but he is not a gateway author. Only a fraction of fans will get past the allure of full-on space opera and find their way to someone like Kim Stanley Robinson. By contrast, most people’s introduction to adult fantasy is likely to be either The Lord of the Rings or – nowadays – A Song of Ice and Fire, and the environmentalist themes are in place from the start. The beginner texts may not receive the same critical attention as more sophisticated works, but they are more influential; these are the stories people read while they’re young.
Does SF have an inherent disadvantage when it comes to portraying environmentalism? Maybe, but there are a few things its practitioners might bear in mind. First, any novel that’s set anything more than a few decades into the future has to include the effects of climate change. It’s ridiculous not to. You can make all the cute predictions about artificial intelligence you like: if you set your story in 2100 and don’t at least give lip-service to extreme weather and an ice-free Arctic, your imagined future will be irrelevant. It would be like a science fiction writer of the early twentieth century deciding, without explanation, to imagine a futuristic society without computers or space travel.
Some of the techniques of fantasy aren’t really available to science fiction authors. It’s hard within science fiction to personify nature (although Avatar did give it a shot). SF authors, being oh-so-rational, wouldn’t dream of anthropomorphising a tree – and then they have the devil’s own job making the trees matter. Shorn of the ability to walk and talk, greenery’s a poor protagonist. [I didn't anticipate Adrian Tchaikovsky's Children of Time series, which among other things personifies slime moulds.]
But perhaps SF authors could trust the real science a bit more. Most ecologists, for instance, don’t talk much about the beauty of wilderness, but about “ecosystem services”: the things that ecosystems like forests do for us that we don’t appreciate until they’re gone. For instance, forests clean dirt out of the rivers that flow through them, ensuring that people living downstream have access to clean water. When you take that into account, preserving the forest stops being about having a nice place to go for a walk, and becomes a health issue. Frank Herbert used this idea in Dune half a century ago, but it hasn’t had much play since.
One big thing science fiction could do is ditch the libertarian fringe. SF has done so little on the environment because the genre can’t bear to let go of its libertarian ideals. It’s easier to transfer those ideals into outer space (where resources seem effectively limitless) than face up to the realities of life on the ground. From Heinlein on, the genre has pushed an extreme freedom ethic that rejects any notion that society has the right to curtail an individual’s actions, particularly if those actions are part of a free market.
This is an easy place to write from, but it’s a calamitous philosophy to live by. We often hear complaints that SF has lost its can-do optimism. Well, is it any wonder? In the hard, chromed, rugged, affectless shambles SF has made of the world, the introduction of some shamanic wonder - or failing that, a little love of place and people - would go a very long way.
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