Reconfigured Temporalities - Berghahn Journals

Reconfigured Temporalities Nature’s Intent? Nathalie Blanc and Agnès Sander !

ABSTRACT

Speculative fiction as a literary genre is a test of the renewed relation to nature presented as possible reality. The vision of nature presented by some science fiction and fantasy authors varies along these lines. The hypothesis underlying the present article is that these “speculative fiction–proposed natures” force us to rethink the rapport between time and space. Therefore, we need to examine to what extent science fiction and fantasy, focused on the preparation of an uncertain future, play on the links between time and nature and reconfigure both the agencies and the aesthetic situations that serve as experiments. KEYWORDS

ecology, nature, speculative fiction, temporalities

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Introduction Speculative fiction defines all sorts of literature in which a deed, event, object, character, or décor is expressly speculative, that is, whose existence is posited as possible or real by right, even if it has no de facto existence. This speculative element must have an indispensable role in the fiction, either as the object of the entire creation or as a preliminary to the development of the plot. So, we may say that the genres of science fiction, fantasy, and fantastic literature all belong to speculative fiction. Speculative fiction as a literary genre is a test of the renewed relation to nature presented as possible reality. The vision of nature presented by some science fiction and fantasy authors varies along these lines. The hypothesis underlying the present article is that these “speculative fiction–proposed natures” force us to rethink the rapport between time and space. Therefore, we need to examine to what extent science fiction and fantasy, focused on the preparation of an uncertain future, play on the links between time and nature and reconfigure both the agencies and the aesthetic situations that serve as experiments. Nature and Culture 9(1), Spring 2014: 1–20 © Berghahn Journals doi:10.3167/nc.2014.090101

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NATHALIE BLANC AND AGNÈS SANDER

This analysis is not a literary criticism but a “sociocriticism” based on the thematic content of science fiction stories. This follows the approach of other authors (Berard and Uhl 2012) in carrying out a study of the imaginary of nature and associated temporalities in light of the issue of the environment and its development from the 1990s under the guise of sustainable development. This is an extensive corpus, and the reflection set out below, although based on a reading of many texts, does not claim to be exhaustive. Our reading has highlighted research pointers for understanding how nature cultures are changing in terms of social imaginary. This work is rooted in environmental aesthetics, which factor in agency and interagency as aesthetic situations bound up with an analysis of time, as the first section discusses. The next section analyzes how time is changing in relation to the agencies ascribed to components of the natural and built environment. We then describe the literary corpus used, which comprises works of science fiction and fantasy. In the final three sections, we discuss the threefold polarity that underpins the temporal agencies at work.

Theoretical Considerations This research was conceived of within the interpretive framework of the theoretical corpus of environmental aesthetics. Without going into an in-depth explanation of this theoretical project—which has been provided elsewhere (Blanc 2008, 2012)—it is nevertheless important to explain what it is. Environmental aesthetics is a science that strives to determine the manner in which the aesthetic dimension is factored into the assessment and creation of natural and built environments. It also attempts to gain a more effective understanding of contemporary aesthetic imperatives bound up with the production of the environment. Therefore, environmental aesthetics aims to determine how a collective sentiment emerges in the dissemination of a shared environmental aesthetic that includes a social component combining power and information sharing. As such, we need to analyze the type of aesthetic (and ethical) challenge bound up with contemporary contemplation and production of environments. And we consider that this brings aesthetic situations into play: at a certain moment and in a given configuration, the components of the natural and built environments attain agency and thus an impact on the public concerned. For example, we do not sit on the grass, as it is considered dirty. This 2

RECONFIGURED TEMPORALITIES

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analysis harks back to what we believe to be the key work of Gell (1998), who felt that art-like situations are situations whose material part or material index (the visible, physical thing) authorizes an operation of singular familiarity. The observer may establish a causal inference or an inference concerning the person or thing at the origin of the event. Agential realism and new materialism, highlighted particularly by Karen Barad and Stacy Alaimo, lay down the conditions for a new approach to agency. Karen Barad’s analysis of the quantum theory of Niels Bohr, especially in Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (2007), contends that nothing exists without interaction and this defines a fluctuating object symbolically and materially, imbued with contingency possibilities. The ontology of objects under consideration is always subjected to an appreciation of changing systems. However, in Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self (2010), Stacy Alaimo places interaction between the internal milieu of the body and the external milieu of the environment. What needs to be stressed at this stage in the light of agency theories is the fluctuating character of aesthetic situations that constitute an agential experience: this mobility has an impact both on their materiality, through sensations, perceptions, and representations bound up with practices, as well as on their symbolic and imaginary component. Agency is a relationship that occasionally defines an object and crystallizes it in an image that only comes undone over the long term. Interagency multiplies these relational exchanges on a case-by-case basis. How do such considerations affect our approach? Let us reiterate: time changes in relation to agencies and interagencies ascribed to elements of the natural and built environments. Writing and especially science fiction help us to appreciate these changes.

Working Assumptions Time plays a key role in structuring human activities and therefore, as a social marker, it has social efficiency potential. The albeit fluctuating manner in which we perceive it points to major variations of late that represent a break with the period of modernity. It is remarkable that the idea of development (and not sustainable development) signalled new ways of envisaging the future as well as the past by factoring in the whole question of the reproduction of the human species in 3

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history. Reconfiguring temporal relations mobilizes new regimes of historicity (Hartog 2003; Delacroix et al. 2007; Abecassis 2009). Why not replace a nostalgic interpretation of history—a “consumptionobsessed,” demonized present (Rosa 2010) and a worrying future— with an analysis of time from the perspective of the importance of the here and now that activates and reactivates possibilities? This present lends substance and breathes life into the singularities of beings and the events that affect them in a naturalized version of facts. Jean-Marc Besse refers to a “historic turning point” (2009; quoted by Abecassis 2009: 7) that affects all of the social sciences, marked by “a new theoretical sensibility that is more attentive to the temporal dimension of phenomena.” These disciplines, affected by a new social perception of time dating from the 1980s, would be relegated to “responding to the challenges of a disorientated time in an unprecedented, hard-todecipher combination of an opaque past and a future in crisis, with a monstrous present placed centre stage, in charge of all existential functionalities, which had previously been split on an approximate basis between a past that provided lessons for the present and a future for guiding that present” (ibid.). This idea is similar to an analysis of ways of geometrically sequencing contemporary space and time. It is far removed from approaches that stress the importance of present time as the lack of a future, and our analysis tends to depict regimes of historicity intervening in a complex system of interactions. Nature emerges as a binocular for interpreting contemporary space and time. Nature is no longer thought as the “ground that carries us” (MerleauPonty 1995: 19),1 but as “this time that leads us.” Nature has become an actor in the narrative and a protagonist in the plot. The new relation between nature and humanity, the explicit or implicit subject of many science fiction novels, can be analyzed according to three axes or “polarities”. We propose to call the first one the “long term”. It describes an eternal, self-sufficient, ecosystemic, and overriding nature. The “long term” is the period during which the earth (which is deemed equivalent to a living or thinking organism or a conscience) is endowed with long temporality (Wilson 2006 is an example); confronting it involves rediscovering your memory. This nature occupies a particular place in the human mind-set: not only is it there for all eternity, but it is also the repressed part of civilized humanity. This “long-term” nature is also the nature that we have neglected, a nature inside us that could in a certain way correspond to our profound humanity or to a naturalized unconsciousness. 4


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The second polarity concerns a wisely and carefully cultivated human nature; we call this the “old past”, and it involves new farming systems or ways of cultivating the soil specific to tribes that could have been described as primitive but that, in science fiction, are often the bearers of a new future. The “old past” is the depiction of a golden age, an agrarian age, and/or an age during which the people were in harmony with nature and its cycles. This harmony is defined in myths by a symbiotic or respectful way of life. Human communities live by the seasons. The techniques used to cultivate nature are simple. This is radically opposed to an urban nature that could be described as neglecting seasonal and natural cycles. Consequently, the whole question of memory is also one of delving into the past to eke out the forces of the future. It concerns the transmission of relevant uses for perceiving the future. The last polarity concerns the extravagance of human beings faced with a raging nature: we call this the “present future”. This last scenario is catastrophic: its nature is sublime. Finally, the “present future” is the spectacle of a future that already exists, ready to insert itself into the present or, more simply, of a present switching to the future. The present is on the point of blowing out like a light or, like everyday life, sometimes tranquil and associated with a certain degree of comfort that suddenly tumbles into the unreality of an upheaval. This is the break in day-to-day time.

Corpus Our corpus of a hundred texts draws from English and French (and occasionally German and Russian) science fiction, but does not claim to encompass all works of this genre. Some 50,000 English and 7,000 French books are currently referenced under “science fiction” on Amazon. Beyond these books, we systematically searched through the different installments of the Great Anthology of Science Fiction2 using keywords or themes such as “lifestyles” and “ecology,” and analyzed the journals Mondes futures, Univers (whose editor in chief is Yves Fremion, now a member of the French Green Party), and ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment. We also drew upon dictionaries of science fiction, the www.quarante-deux.org website. Our corpus was selected with the aim of a prospective exploration of future lifestyles in science fiction. Science fiction is essentially a genre invented as a “social anticipation” of what a society could have 5

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become when the social sciences were emerging in the nineteenth century. For authors, it is not just about creating a portrait of a future society, but about tracing, with the help of narrative coherence, a historical development of what a society could become if a few variables of our world were modified. Thus, a big part of science fiction as a genre answers the following question: “What would happen if … ?” Many science fiction authors construct social hypotheses in this manner. To build scenarios they play on variables in a very rigorous way because of the imperative of narrative coherence, and they test both the reader’s credulity and the story’s credibility. It does not have to be about predicting the future: John G. Ballard explains (2008) that he only described what he saw happening around him. Science fiction authors, like artists, reveal realities that everyone can but does not necessarily see. Moreover, science fiction authors frequently exaggerate or magnify a particular trait in addition to developing a hypothesis. The themes of the planet, of nature and its destruction, and of possible environments play a crucial role in a science fiction that never stops inventing new ways to put its characters and readers to the test. Science fiction has an epistemological function in a situation of uncertainty similar to that of thought experiments; a heuristic function insofar as certain experiments described may seek to be reproduced by science; an awareness-raising function inasmuch as it attracts investments (this is especially true in research and development); a regulatory function, given that it channels expectations and repulsions and modifies problem awareness; and a social function, as it guides public debate, particularly in relation to science/society. Although science fiction initially disseminated a positive imaginary of science and technology linked to the development of a technological capitalism, at the present time, it helps project a darker image of the future. The bulk of our corpus comprises science fiction stories; however, it also contains works of fantasy, notably the remarkable work by Robert Holdstock, Mythago Wood (1984). Generally speaking, fantasy literature uses magical and other supernatural phenomena as primary elements in the plot, narration, or theme. Thus, fantasy is bound up with enchanted nature: all sorts of mythological people or fairies emerge from forests, seas, and other natural milieus.

Nature Is Power: “Long-Term” Time The first polarity concerns nature—all powerful, self-sufficient, and regulated—that is a mirror of human fears; it assumes the role of a 6


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planet that is also an extraterrestrial (Lem 1961), a self-regulated system (Herbert 1963, 1966), and ultimately the collective unconsciousness of humanity (Holdstock 1984). It is an eternal nature that constitutes the backdrop of human lives. The texts are fascinating, often bewitching. The Hellaconia cycle by Brian Aldiss (1982) is emblematic of this trend, as the author systematically explores the Gaia hypothesis (Lovelock 1972). This is also true of the third volume of the Ender series, Xenocide, by Orson Scott Card (1991). These two works pose the same question of free will submitted to the cycle of nature to the point where sentient beings become mere elements of the systemic biodiversity necessary for the survival of the planet and other species. Brought to the screen in 1972 by Andreï Tarkovski, Solaris, written by Stanislaw Lem (1961), represented a limited but exemplary experience of a meeting between the human unconscious and nature, personified by an alien planet with a conscience, even though this remains inscrutable. The occupants of the Solaris observation station are visited by creatures issued from their memories or buried in their subconscious. These nonhuman or enhanced “a-human” visitors are simulacra, infinitely reproducible creations for which the protoplasmic and intelligent ocean that covers Solaris drew the model from the astronauts’ brains. The reason why the ocean sends visitors to the orbital station is an enigma for the astronauts. Could it be a first contact? Does nature communicate to human beings through images and memories related to individuals’ unconsciousness? Approached poetically, the planet Solaris is also a threat—possibly that represented by all nonexplicit and darkened subconsciousness. Planet enigma, this meeting with the mystery of self in the genre of science fiction, shows that the future can be depicted using self-discovery, this self being an alien nature. The celebrated Dune cycle by Frank Herbert depicts this relationship to a nature that would be examined over the long term. Begun in 1963 and finished 20 years later, this series of works, the first of which was also brought to the screen by David Lynch in 1984, focuses on a symbiotic relationship between humans and a sandy planet inhabited by huge worms. The ecology appendix in Dune has a speech by Pardot Kynes, a planetologist, who explains that ecology is a new symbol-based language that prepares the mind for the manipulation of a whole landscape, its climates and seasons. The modus vivendi of the planetologist—and probably of the Dune cycle—is that of existing on any planet: a sort of internal beauty made up of movements and equilibrium that produces a dynamic stabilizer effect that is essential to the existence of living beings. For the author, life is at the service 7

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of life. All of the work consists of setting this idea to music. The frugal and parsimonious lifestyles recycle bodies and water in a world where water is rationed and the planet is populated by monstrous animals and gigantic worms that sometimes emerge on the surface. The rest is—rather fratricidal—dynasty, hereditary sovereignty, and, ultimately, games of power distribution. In another novel by Frank Herbert, The Green Brain (1966), it is the insects, attempting to avert their extermination by man, that will actually save man in spite of everything, thus demonstrating to a few emissaries of the human race that biodiversity is necessary for the survival of all. This vision displays a huge faith in the self-regulation of systems. Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock (1984) also features a total and global nature, but in the form of a small wood in which men get lost—in all the senses of the term—giving rise to myths, tales, and legends: the forest reveals a collective unconscious to humanity and characters are therefore many and varied. They emanate from strata that are depicted gradually as the main character goes deeper into the forest. Both the journey into the depths of the forest and the unconscious reflect a similar dynamic: events gradually take on meaning according to a labyrinthine pattern. From here, fusion with a nature that often represents a psychological mode of access to reality has two possible consequences; either man experiences self-revelation (notably, by being gifted with parapsychic powers that were undoubtedly always there, but were only revealed by the new link to nature [Simak 1955]); or, on the contrary, man loses his humanity and his singularity in the process (Aldiss 1962). Nature is considered the backdrop of human theatre, and in many John G. Ballard short stories, humans disappear and give way to plants, animals, and an ocean said to be the Age of Trias, a universe predating the world. Time regulated by man ceases to exist and becomes uniquely biological; the world extracts itself from the human matrix. In “The Day of Forever” (1967), the earth stops turning and every town is called after the time at which it stopped, such as Columbine Seven Hours. A few rare men follow the slowly receding line of the dusk, like in a slow and declining road movie. In other Ballard short stories, clocks are symbolically either banned or stopped. In a way, the recognition of an extraterrestrial or terrestrial ecosystem amounts to the recognition of a nature ensconced for all time within the human memory. It is a kind of past future; an encounter with an ancestral—and possibly future—world that may always have been present. 8


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Plural History and “Old Past” In many works of science fiction, including a number of recent works, ecological catastrophe begets pessimistic visions of modes of human development and exploitation of natural resources. This constitutes a second polarity. The possible balancing forces for resolving current difficulties are to be found within agrarian communities: visions of a pastoral nature and “primitive” organization modes. It is important to distinguish the different cultural traditions in pastoralism. It is obvious that pastoralism is in accord with Petainist ideals (paternalism, the cult of the body, work, and a nurturing Mother Nature figure) or Barjavel’s ideals (1943), but different from the pastoralism born out of the conquest of the American West, which was rather agrarian—classless and democratic—where the rural world comes into conflict with the diabolical urban world (Proietti 1992). On the American side, an important critical school of thought (Yanarella 2001) tends to advocate a pastoral way of life, close to that of the American pioneers (the figure of Johnny Appleseed planting apple trees is used very explicitly as a reference by a number of authors). How should we understand the trend of representing the future as a world between agropastoralism and communitarianism? Nature is a source of social regeneration. But not just any nature: a neatly cultivated nature, a nature where human beings follow the cycles. It represents an alternative model to excessive development. The individual is related to ancient forms of a rapport with nature (sometimes qualified as reactionary). There exists a rural nostalgia that takes on new forms with the emergence of the environmental question. Imagination and memories permit us to represent agricultural traditions, essential for the creation of new development paths. When they are reactivated and reorganized, these legendary—often mythologized—memories of a complicit natural rural world give new meaning to the idea of duration, progress, and history. The future is behind us, and this must not be forgotten as long as there really is a future. Is science fiction’s main characteristic not to play with time as with a harmonica, allowing for various possibilities and scenarios? In our opinion, an important work illustrates this imaginary: The World Inside by Robert Silverberg (1971) offers a critical version of a mode of development that focuses on a rurality depicted as functional, that is, it helps nurture the urbanites grouped in gigantic towers, each housing over 800,000 people. The lifestyles in these towers promote complete sexual freedom within a totalitarian and very un9

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equal framework that sets the limits of this hybrid neocommunist/hippie mode of existence. A few recent works, including some that feature past futures, would also appear to be key. Elisabeth Vonarburg, in Chroniques du pays des mères (In the Mothers’ Land) (1996), imagines postcarbon modes of living that evolve positively in the long term. Five generations after the crisis and revolution that first led to an inegalitarian society, equilibrium emerges in the shape of a matriarchal society founded on small autonomous units. Men exist for reproductive purposes only, and the danger of an unsustainable lifestyle is always present due to illnesses, genetics, or simply forgetting about the purpose of humanity. The society depicted is not perfect but gradually gets better, this time without catastrophe or revolution, during the seventy years covered in the novel. The organization of societies or communities has evolved when compared to the present time. The matriarchal society depicted represents a countermodel (pacifist?) of present-day society. The human and social sciences encountered in the novel participate in the analysis of what most concerns these societies: historical research challenges dogmatic positions. Discussions and shared information constitute a type of learning that reduces otherness between men and women, between normal and mutant, and between representatives of different religious movements. Assemblies bring together representatives from the “burgs” in order to make decisions. The collective organization structure is close to that of small agrarian or pastoral communities in which it is notable that women hold a central role. The twenty years between The World Inside and In the Mothers’ Land witnessed the emergence of the environmental issue, with all its thematic riches and emotional charges: catastrophes and anxieties of all kinds that give rise to a new perspective on rural-communitarian solutions. In short, what seems essential to this trend is that agricultural and lifestyle modes are depicted by gestures indicating a slowness and attunement to nature’s rhythm and cycles; time aims to be without violence. The forms of begetting duration are maturely thought out. Space is managed more than it is arranged or circumscribed. However, a second trend seems to link back to the “old past”, that is, stories describing people that accompany nature’s rhythm. These stories refer to “cold societies” (Levi-Strauss 1960) whose ethnic population—as explored by the anthropology of colonial exposure—would have developed differently than Western societies and therefore would have maintained close contact with nature and lived in harmony with it. These people represent the prehistory of the relationship between hu10


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mans and nature, but they are also a future from which we can draw lessons. The works of Ursula Le Guin are exemplary in emphasizing these types of relationships with “model” societies, and they recently inspired James Cameron’s movie Avatar. The Word for World Is Forest (Le Guin 1972b) points to the fusion between the indigenous and the surrounding world. Only invaders destroy this complete ecology of which the natives are an integral part. It is an ecological diversion: once a world is exploited and devastated, the destroyers from elsewhere go on to the next place. In a number of novels by Le Guin (1966, 1969), it is the environment and related challenges (including severe cold—already the climate here has gained in importance) that bring men together and help them to rise above their trivial cultural differences. In The Birthday of the World, a short story collection by Ursula Le Guin published in 2002, “Paradise Lost” describes the long voyage toward another planet in a world-ship. The travellers rediscover the basics of life on the ground starting from almost nothing: they knew only plastic and they discover wood; they have to learn that the sunlight is hot and can burn. Should we interpret the journey in the ship as a metaphor for a crisis on planet earth, a crisis that irremediably distances us from nature and knowledge of nature? The story is also an interesting text on memory and reconstructing memory after a catastrophe caused by obscurantist religion, as in another book by Ursula Le Guin, The Telling (1972a), where a whole planet is reconverted to the religion of progress in the face of resistance from natives to the culture that underpins the story. Many more authors, from Simak (1955) to Kelly (2005), attempt to turn the future into a past present in the nostalgic desire to recompose a mythologized world: possibly paradise lost? Awareness of the limits of nature encounters a return to an ancient pastoral and/or agrarian lifestyle that reveals man to himself. Nature is attributed the role of a limit, a framework, or a norm. However, transgressing the limits laid down harks back to changes in the state of the related phenomena and to the responsibility of human beings.

Catastrophic Response or the “Future Present” Science fiction depicts stories that involve varying lengths of time to which the characters adapt. Since the 1950s, catastrophe has been 11

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present in science fiction. It has also given rise to an intense production of short stories. Overpopulation, with its cruel consequences (eugenics, famine, etc.), is one of the main themes. Philip José Farmer (1971) describes “defrosted” people every other day, while in the stories of Wyman (in 1951), several people successively inhabit the same body. The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner (1972) marks a turning point in the narrative development of this attempt to describe a past that could be envisioned as a future. Even though The Sheep Look Up could still be a radical ecologist’s bible today, perspectives have changed. Not once is there any allusion in the novel to the real or purported danger of nuclear power plants, and this was at the beginning of the 1970s! The abusively qualified energy crisis that would spread everywhere—especially to France—and the ambitious electronuclear programs following the tripling of oil prices still lay in the future in 1973.3 Characteristically, one of the novel’s heroines, who is concerned with limiting pollution, uses a steam-powered car, because it produces “nothing worse than CO2 and water.” At the end of our century, when the principal menace—rightly or wrongly— appears to come precisely from CO2 via the greenhouse gas effect and global warming, this remark, like the mental blockage regarding civilian nuclear power, seems strange (Klein 1998). And yet John Brunner’s novel seems to retain its major qualities, the most important of which warn us against the fragility of our anticipations, even well-informed ones. We are heading straight for a humanitarian and ecological catastrophe in the short term: recent science fiction authors in the “hard sciences” (Barnes 1994) focused on more societal visions (Dufour 2005). Authors with a more mystical approach (Butler 1993) describe the darkest effects: massive destruction of coastal towns, pollution and illness, poverty and riots. The reasons are the pursuit of our contemporary lifestyles: hazardous scientific manipulations (Barnes 1994; Ballard 1962) and corruption (Robinson 1972, among others) mean that the virtuous actions that we demand of the most vulnerable cannot slow the ecological decline. It is the same for the economic interests of big firms, which reduce public action to vain pious words. The catastrophe concerns lifestyles in a more general way (Robert Charles Wilson, Catherine Dufour, Octavia Butler, John G. Ballard, etc.) through oil shortages (Eschbach 2007) or the depletion of resources. Catastrophe is here. It takes the form of spectacular riots: we witness a mass naturalism. It is a perspective that can even become mundane, as evidenced by the clever short story by Robert Silver12


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berg (1972), “When We Went to See the End of the World,” or the more poignant story by Henry Kuttner and Catherine Moore, “Vintage Season” (1946). Recently, catastrophe has focused on the climate. Climate disruption helps to mark out human beings as a species dependent on its environment (Card 1986; Aldiss 1962) and figures as a weapon of punishment, leading to a wealth of scholarly and religious discourse on the topic. However, more recent science fiction, more akin to documentary, harks back to the sources of the genre and to Jules Verne (Mcmullen 1999). The fact that recent science fiction is becoming closer and closer to reality—and in a way “performative”—can lead us to think that this is a fierce struggle with nature for eventual victory. Spectacular science fiction writing reappropriates the elements of myths (floods, destruction by fire, ashes and volcanoes, etc.) and renews the interpretation of catastrophe (e.g., Barnes 1994; Sterling 1994). Testing oneself by confronting nature. The action is situated in the great landscapes in the midst of sublime immensities. This neo-Romanticism renews the codes of heroism and replaces traditional confrontation with human enemy forces: the hero confronts a rampaging nature or adapts to its disruption. The hero manages to link the local and the global, the interdependencies and solidarities of the biophysical world to the inhabited world. “Cosmologization” begins with internalization, and heroism begins with the “selective sorting of household waste” (Chelebourg 2009; Goulart 1970). Heavy Weather by Bruce Sterling (1994) depicts a hacker genius as a characteristic and temperamental hero. When, in 2031, the world suffers tornadoes and typhoons caused by the greenhouse gas effect, a counterculture group of techies calling themselves the Tempest Troupe are chasing an ever more violent tornado that could be unstoppable; a violent and perpetual phenomenon is ravaging the landscape because of the “hacking”. The hero uses, exploits, and develops—for ends known only to himself—elements developed by a numerical system with terrifying consequences. The “life-sized” players—adventurers in a modern world—are symptoms of a type of communitarian marginal resistance. They are new types of heroes in a critical situation faced with a second nature. The ecological hero fights for and/or against nature, acts locally, and thinks globally. He has a sense of voluntary simplicity, of giving up, and of an organic universality. Turning to female writers and the work of an emblematic author, Octavia Butler, the ecological heroine responds to the catastrophe by sowing the seeds of the future. In the Parable of the Sower (1993), Lauren Oya Olamina, a black teenager and daughter of a pastor, grows up 13

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in 2025 in a gated community in a world riven by chaos due to the rise of ultraliberalism. The heroine attempts to save the world in a California devastated by climate change. Lauren is hyperempathetic and leads masses of poor people that are homeless (or living on the road) toward a new religion, Seeds of the Earth, that is prone to adaptation and change—midway between Buddhism and evolutionism. The believers are exhorted to “form God,” because “God is change,” mainly so that they recognize their own power to affect and direct change = God. The work is part of the Earthseed series, and the term “Earthseed” comes from the idea that life’s seeds on earth can be transplanted and adapted to many situations and places. Time metaphors and the germinating seed evoke the potential future. The seed actually contains time and its eventual developments. Through the question of seeding, we encounter the previously discussed link between the feminine figure and pastoralism, sublimated here in the role of Jeanne d’Arc. The responses to the catastrophe are many and varied. The frightful worlds described are not merely sombre, but highlight the pleasures associated with catastrophe: extraordinary spectacles and the disruption of everyday norms and habits give rise to excitement and an effervescence that is sometimes akin to joy. The renewal of codes of action corresponds to a Phusis, or a real living activity. The upheaval in nature generates renewal. Nature is apparent in a series of catastrophes that shake up the established human order and trigger passionate behavior that is essential for the reproduction of living forces. For other authors, fascinated by technical futures, if a historical process is to save humans, thanks should be duly given to posthumans or transhumans: cyborgs and products of genetic engineering, of a technological singularity popularized by Vernor Vinge (1993), but more largely explored by Karl Schroeder (2002).

Conclusions The nature of science fiction is not only constituted by an evocation of the poetic mode of earth-sky-sea correspondence, or by a “scientific” objectification of nature (naturalism), but, more often, by the introduction of nature as an essential if not the main actor. The components of the natural environment react not just with human activities, but also develop negative responses when faced with the actions of human beings. The consequence of this is a dialogue. Human beings attribute intentions to these elements of the natural environment (vegetation, 14


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air, water, etc.), and such processes may even contribute to imputing them with a conscience. We feel that one of the specific traits of writings on nature in works of science fiction and fantasy is to depict nature acting in relation to human action. The time highlighted by “sustainable development” is not the same as the time depicted in relation to the whole question of development in “modern times” that invites consideration of progress in the historic order of societies. This is threefold time: time that drives coexisting orders of value and makes them succeed each other in ideological and historical confrontations. Environmental issues force us to reconsider the relationship between society and nature. Nature is no longer outside us; it emanates from cultures that are as varied as the range of earthly cultures. However, to become internal, and considered within the framework of our cultures, the question of time attributed to nature is essential, that is, the temporalities that we attribute to it in representations. First, nature can be humanity’s memory; it represents a source (we are all animals), and therefore an origin and a foundation; it produces an archaeology. Rediscovering this nature ensures an authentic and real humanity. The development of this thematic explains the academic success of the long story and of genetics. The arrow of time is a new vector for humanity through sustainable development; humanity can take not only its social, but also its biological evolution in hand (although not always its natural evolution). The reconnection to nature operates in different ways through the other, ethnology, primitive peoples, archaeology, the quest for a “historically erased” humanity, and so forth. Reconnection to nature is also mystical: the quest for the great whole, for the equivalent totality of the planet, itself, an organism, a supertext, and more. Second, another figure of memory links back to agrarian myths: nature is a landmark, melding the idea of a golden age with the origin of civilization—a pastoral and bucolic nature. This last figure actively concerns the present: new forms of habitat once more take on communitarian—sometimes antique and preindustrial—aspects (e.g., Mouvement pour l’Habitat Groupé4 ecovillages, etc.). Third, this science fiction depicts a magnificent nature that is greater than man; to encounter it is to awaken what is big in oneself. From then on, science fiction—close to public opinion and an essentially male popular readership that loves spectacular catastrophes—reappropriates the mythological aspects of natural catastrophes (floods, burials, punishment, etc.) associated with recent ecological predictions. The myth is now very close to current reality. This nature 15

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that rages constitutes an answer. An answer to industrial woes … an answer to the difficulty of imagining a currently habitable world. We have tried to develop “polarities” that permit us to trace the new rapport with time inherent in this ecology present in the field of speculative fiction. In brief, a speculative fiction that testifies to a new encounter with nature at the dawn of ecological catastrophes, embracing certain temporalities and novel life cycles; from the local to the global, as presented by environmentalists; from here and now, one-off, catastrophic events to an eternal all-powerful nature described by many novelists. Is this really a new narrative configuration? Nature became a full-time actor at a very early stage in speculative fiction texts.5 A diachronic study would allow us to explore and deepen our understanding of the roots of this movement. The short story by Abraham Merrit, “The Woman of the Wood,” published in Weird Tales in 1926, is an example of this. Many quasi-fantastic texts from the 1920s to the 1950s describe a voluntarily hostile nature: birds attack (Du Maurier 1952), ivy goes crazy (Keller 1930), and so forth. From the 1940s on, Brian Stableford (2005) notes a greater ecological coherence in the description of the worlds depicted by speculative fiction. He cites short stories by Clifford D. Simak (1942), Eric Franck Russel (1943), and Hal Clement (1946) that include nature as part of literary devices and develop very rigorous ecospherical constructions. Even though they are not new, the time/space configurations pointed to by the environmental question need to be re-examined. For geographers, time and space are mediums of individualization and of social differentiation, meaning cultural development (Harvey 1990). What awaits us? The recourse to the environment, to the environmental crisis (in this third state), allows us to reconstruct time/nature as a language. First, bold striking images (a living planet, an intelligent planet, the forest as memory, etc.) structure the idea of nature replete with intentions and intelligence, capable of constituting itself as man’s equal; nature is generally living, and we endow it with effectuation processes. Second, the type of media: the fictional gap allows the creation of an alternative reality on top of actual reality. Nature is the reality of present time and exacerbated nature. It emanates horror and catastrophe. It is the surplus of language, the excess of function. Finally, is nostalgia not simply the idea of a lost memory, of a language and a way of being to rediscover work, as much as a way of bringing to mind these eventualities? Nostalgia is a way of articulating the past and present to make them work together in a sort of “signifying inver16


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sion”; because the past is the past, it cannot be a future; however, the signification and meaning we give to the past can become a future. What are we aiming for through these language inversions? It is about providing humanity with a crucible once again. The matrix is natural. It is global, total. The associations with the matrix are considered as being in the past, hence the nostalgia. As far as catastrophe is concerned, this is what will happen to us—a source of possible pleasure—in the event that we do nothing. ! Nathalie Blanc is a research director at the CNRS in the field of geography (UMR 7533 LADYSS). Her research interests include nature in the city and environmental aesthetics. In 2010, she published Ecoplastie: Art and Environment with Julie Ramos. Since 2008, she has codirected the national research program on urban greenways together with P. Clergeau. Between 2003 and 2008, she also worked on how inhabitants move into living environments as a part of a European research program (PUCA). Address: 31 Rue, Vandrezanne, Paris, 75013, France. E-mail: [email protected] Agnès Sander, DESA, was a senior lecturer at the University of West Paris Nanterre La Défense and a member of the LAVUE research unit (UMR CNRS 7145). She was also an associate professor at Sciences-Po Paris, a member of the editorial committee of the scientific journal Flux, International Scientific Quarterly on Networks and Territories, and coeditor in chief of the metropolitiques.eu journal. Her research work, conducted within the framework of the Mosaïques LAVUE Laboratory, focused on the morphogenesis of the different types of urban infrastructure: streets, technical networks such as water, or transport networks; and green spaces in the city. Agnès Sander passed away in 2012.

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Notes 1. “Moreover, can we really study the notion of nature? Is it not something other than the product of a history during which it acquired a series of meanings that eventually made it unintelligible? We really need to focus on the history of misunderstandings over the meaning of the word, but if these changes were incidental, would there not be something that was always meant or expressed by those who employed the words?” (Merleau-Ponty 1995: 19). He also says: “Nature is an enigmatic object, an object that is not quite an object; it is not quite in front of us. It is our ground, not what is in front, but what bears us” (ibid.). He provides a meaning before plotting his course. “There is nature everywhere there is life that makes sense except where there is no thought; hence the link with plants: is nature what has sense, without this meaning having been posed by thought? It is the auto-production of meaning. So nature is different from a simple thing; it has an inside—determines itself from the inside—from which the op-

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position of the natural to the accidental stems. And yet, Nature is different from man; it is not instituted by man, it opposes customs and discourse. Nature is the primordial, i.e., the non-constructed, the non-instituted; hence the idea of an eternal nature (eternal return), a solidity” (ibid.). 2. “This monumental anthology, compiled by Jacques Goimard, Gérard Klein, and Demètre Ioakimidis in 1966, groups together all the big themes of science fiction in 36 volumes, with 5 added volumes for an analysis of French science fiction. These themes are illustrated by almost 600 short stories dating from 1930 to the present (at least until 1989!) chosen from over several thousand texts written by more than 300 authors. Among them, some very famous writers (Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Dick, Brunner, Farmer, Heinlein, Leiber, Sheckley, Silverberg, etc.) and over 40 French authors (Curval, Jeury, Klein, Andrevon, Brussolo, etc.) for the francophone part of the anthology.” 3. Since the 1970s, the crisis has been proven to be true. The planetary environment is finished; unlimited expansion is no longer possible, because natural resources are limited and activities have damaging consequences on the great bio-geo-physicalchemical cycles (Meadows et al. 1972; Boulding 1966; Dubos and Ward 1973). The question of limits and damage caused by human activities are posed at every level in terms of knock-on effects and unpredicted and dynamic causality. Finally, we are now aware of the relative limits of arable surfaces resulting from the extension of towns, leading to fears of penury for food products, or agricultural intensification, with deleterious effects on the quality and availability of water and the composition and structure of the soil. All these phenomena are affected by climatic and biodiversity changes in progress. This resource crisis is thus prolonged into a catastrophe with hints of vengeance and calls for punishment to be meted out by nature. 4. French movement to promote self-managed housing. 5. It is an active nature that is also sometimes the main protagonist in science fiction stories. We can compare this literature with the works of nature writing. See http://www.fluctuat.net/6860-Nature-Writing-litterature-et-environnement (accessed 18 April 2011).

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Dufour, Catherine. 2005. Le goût de l’immortalité. Paris: Le Livre de Poche Science Fiction. Eschbach, Andreas. 2007. Ausgebrannt. Cologne, Germany: BasteiLübbe. Farmer, Philip José. 1971. “The Sliced-Crosswise Only-on-Tuesday World.” In: Robert Silverberg, editor, pp. 197–214, New Dimensions 1: Fourteen Original Science Fiction Stories. Goulart, Ron. 1970. “Disposal.” Venture Science Fiction, August. Harvey, David. 1990. The Condition of Postmodernity. London: Blackwell. Herbert, Frank. 1963. Dune World. Part 1. Ed. John W. Campbell. New York: Condé Nast. Herbert, Frank. 1966. The Green Brain. New York: ACE. Holdstock, Robert. 1984. Mythago Wood. London: Gollancz. Keller, David H. 1930. “The Ivy War.” Amazing Stories. May. Kelly, James Patrick. 2005. Burn. San Francisco: Tachyon. Kuttner, Henry, and Catherine Moore. 1946. “Vintage Season.” Astounding Science Fiction, no. 190. Le Guin, Ursula. 1966. Planet of Exile. New York: Harper & Row. Le Guin, Ursula. 1969. The Left Hand of Darkness. New York: ACE. Le Guin, Ursula. 1972a. The Telling. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Le Guin, Ursula. 1972b. The Word for World Is Forest. New York: Berkley Book. Le Guin, Ursula. 2002. The Birthday of the World and Other Stories. London: Gollancz. Lem, Stanislaw. 1961. Solaris. Warsaw: Wydawnictwo Mon. Mcmullen, Sean. 1999. Souls in the Great Machine. New York: Tor Books. Merrit, Abraham. 1926. “The Woman of the Wood.” Weird Tales. August. Robinson, Franck M. 1972. “East Wind, West Wind.” Nova 2 (October). Russel, Eric Franck. 1943. “Symbiotica.” Astounding Science Fiction. October. Schroeder, Karl. 2002. Permanence. New York: Tor Books. Silverberg, Robert. 1971. The World Inside. New York: Doubleday. Silverberg, Robert. 1972. “When We Went to See the End of the World.” Universe 2. Simak, Clifford D. 1942. “Tools.” Astounding Science Fiction. July. Simak, Clifford D. 1955. “Full Cycle.” Science Fiction Stories, November. Sterling, Bruce. 1994. Heavy Weather. New York: Bantam USA. Vinge, Vernor. 1993. What is singularity ?, http://mindstalk.net/vinge/vinge-sing.html. The original version of this article was presented at the VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30–31, 1993. A slightly changed version appeared in the Winter 1993 issue of Whole Earth Review. Vonarburg, Elisabeth. 1996. Chroniques du pays des mères [In the mothers’ land]. Paris: Le Livre de Poche. Wilson, Robert Charles. 2006. Spin. New York: Tor Books. Wyman, Guin. 1951. “Beyond Bedlam.” Pp. 17–73, In Spectrum No. 2: A Science Fiction Anthology, ed. Kingsley Amis and Robert Conquest. New York: Macmillan.

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