Ecologists used to think that the systems they studied tended toward equilibrium. Over the course of the 20th century, they have come to realize that turbulence is not a detour but a destination. Humans can wreak havoc on ecosystems, of course, but disturbance in and of itself isn't necessarily a problem; In most ecosystems, the only stable state is a state of disorder. Although the relationships between species are indispensable and often permanent, they are in a state of constant flux, subject to perturbations both small and large. The so-called "balance of nature" is to some extent a mirage.
Science fiction writers and filmmakers seem to have come to a similar understanding. The dystopias and episodic utopias of classic sci-fi are like what ecologists used to call climax societies — mature forests and other ecosystems thought to be stable until upended by an outside force, with the outside force in sci-fi being your only reliable hero. Perhaps because these two or future aliens exist outside the "final frontier" of known space and time, they're often set in imagined Wests: science fiction and its variants have sent the frontier legend into space (Star Trek, among many others), the Pacific Northwest to a nation An isolated splinter (Ecotopia), and I've ruled Los Angeles by any number of high decibels
Disasters.
While technology may solve some problems, it cannot change human behavior, and it certainly cannot fix the relationships between humans and habitats, or between humans and other species.
Later in the twentieth century, some writers—including many who live and work in the West—began to construct futures that are more complex, less certain, and therefore more plausible. “Utopia must be redefined,” frets Tom Barnard in Kim Stanley Robinson's Orange County trilogy, published in the 1980s and 1990s. "It is not the perfect end product of our desires, (but) ... the process of making a better world, the name of one path history can take, a dynamic, tumultuous, painful, endless process." The hyper-imaginative Octavia Butler who, like Robinson, grew up in Los Angeles, set her wisecracking parable series, published in the 1990s, in a California where violence is always present but never predictable. Lauren Oya Olamina, the flawed spiritual leader at the heart of the series, preaches that “the only lasting truth / is change”—a credo that an ecologist could have written.
In Butler's wake, writers such as Claire Faye Watkins and Joy Williams set novels in futuristic Western landscapes, within societies that are fundamentally broken yet continue to evolve. Today, a new generation of Western science fiction writers is exploring possible avenues for better worlds. Portland author Rachel Swirsky, in her futuristic novel January 15th, imagines the individual and societal consequences of paying a universal basic income. Written by New Mexico author Rebecca Roanhorse, Tread of Angels uses its fictional setting in a 19th-century mining town of alternate history to spoil the expected battle between good and evil, wondering if anyone really belongs on one side or the other.
Tread angels
Rebecca Roanhorse, Gallery/Saga Press, 2022
Prayers for the Crown-Shy Becky Chambers, Tordotcom, 2022
January fifteenth
Rachel Swersky, Tordotcom, 2022
Author Becky Chambers, who grew up in Southern California and now lives in Humboldt County, is best known for her adventure novels in outer space, but her latest series, Monk and Robot, is set in a community whose members survived the traumatic transition of what they describe as the "factory age." They aspire to live less destructively than their ancestors, and they do in many ways: their transportation routes are human-powered, their plastic is biodegradable, and their rivers and forests are recovering from the damage of the past. Like some lucky Californians, they live in diverse communities; Their sexual identities are accepted without question, and their vegetables are plentiful and fresh. They also drink a lot of tea, sometimes for therapeutic purposes, and talk fluently about their feelings. However, this cute community is not a traditional utopia. Its members are actively experimenting with different ways of living and working together, as they deal with the ongoing consequences of their past. In A Prayer for the Shy Crown, the second novel in the series, the robot Mosscap reconsiders human society after a long period of estrangement between humans and robots--and forges a bond that, while largely exhilarating, awakens a painful history.
In the ever-growing realm of science fiction subgenres, Chambers is a practitioner of "hopepunk," a label she adopts. "You look at the world just as it is, with all its gloom and all its tragedy, and you say, 'No, I think this could be better,'" she said in an interview last year. "That, to me, is punk as hell." Like Tom Barnard from Robinson, Skeptic Chambers and writers like her in Utopia, instead place their trust in the constant possibility of change.“Hopepunk is not pure and unadulterated,” wrote fantasy writer Alexandra Rowland, who coined the term.“Hopepunk is mean, because that's what happens when you fight.”
These stories of instability and possibility are not recipes. They are experiments that test new technologies and social innovations by imagining a variety of human reactions to them—reactions that are surprising, amusing, and ultimately familiar, no matter how close a place or extraordinary circumstances are. If ecology teaches science fiction about the constancy of change, perhaps science fiction can remind conservation that lasting societal change can only be achieved by people. While technology may solve some problems, it cannot change human behavior, and it certainly cannot fix the relationships between humans and habitats, or between humans and other species. In what future that work — that dynamic, turbulent, agonizing process — is up to us.
This review first appeared on Hi Country News It is republished here with permission. Top photo: Linda Pomerantz
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