Edging Towards an Eco-cosmopolitan Vision

This chapter considers works influenced by the convergence of terraforming and the Gaia Hypothesis in the 1970s. It is during the period of the 1980s-1990s that narratives dealing with terraforming begin to consolidate their tropes and reflect consciously and complexly on the tradition of terraforming created by earlier texts. This period also sees the first overtly environmental philosophical concepts feeding into the terraforming tradition. Part of this transformation is a response to what Ursula K. Heise in Sense of Place, Sense of Planet: The Environmental Imagination of the Global describes as the urgency of developing an eco-cosmopolitanism that embraces both humankind and nature. Heise’s discussion of deterritorialisation is brought to bear to account for the estrangement and homesickness felt by colonisers who are faced with the struggle to make a new home of an alien planet.

Ecology and Environmental Awareness in 1960s–1970s Terraforming Stories

Terraforming and its destructive ecological impact began to receive greater attention in the light of environmentalism in the 1960s-1970s. This chapter draws attention to the links between the utopian imagination, the pastoral, and the notion of the communard, a concept that was re-voiced in “New Age” environmentalist discourse. The first section compares and contrasts several significant proto-Gaian works while the second explores terraforming narratives that re-work the 1950s tradition. Citing Val Plumwood’s analysis of dualistic operations in Feminism and the Mastery of Nature, the conflict between colonising forces and indigenous populations is considered. This section argues that the popular ecological image of connection and the theme of love is a symbolic attempt to bridge the hyperseparation between dualised concepts; between coloniser and colonised, nature and culture.

The American Pastoral and the Conquest of Space

This chapter analyses the American Pastoral in the first terraforming boom of the 1950s. Referencing Ernest J. Yanarella’s discussion of terraforming in The Cross, the Plow and the Skyline: Contemporary Science Fiction and the Ecological Imagination, this chapter begins with the image of the pioneer farmer that attracted westward expansion and its obverse, the portrayal of dystopian societies where the promise of the pastoral is co-opted. This section recalls the “Garden of the Chattel” image of American colonialism, in which pastoral themes sublimate and so conceal the historic fact of slavery that underlay agricultural production in the American South. The final section considers the propensity to extend human moral systems to aliens and how the pastoral and elements of the sublime converge to offer counter-narratives highlighting the ecological devastation caused by the human expansion into space.

Terraforming: Engineering Imaginary Environments

Beginning with the coining of “terraforming” by science fiction writer Jack Williamson, this chapter explores the boundaries of the term in scientific discourse and in fiction, focusing attention on its significance for stories of interplanetary colonisation. It compares terraforming with its Earthbound counterpart, geoengineering, thus highlighting how science fiction explores modes of relating to Earth’s environment. It introduces James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and explains its significance for terraforming, and explores the nature of science fiction’s environmental engagement and its intersections with ecocritical concerns. It also introduces the concept of nature’s otherness and of landscaping, and connects the latter to Bakhtin’s chronotope, thus delineating an analytical framework for exploring how space and time is invested with human value and meaning in science fictional narratives.

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy

The final chapter analyses Robinson’s multiple award winning Mars trilogy. It considers cybernetic themes in conceptions of terraforming and biospheres, and synthesises two related concepts, Jed Rasula’s “composting” and Thierry Bardini’s “junk,” to characterise the ramified dialogism of terraforming narratives. It explores pastoral images of the garden and, through Simon Hailwood, brings to bear Nagel’s notion of intersubjectivity and the process of “stepping back” to account for the change of perspective toward the natural world experienced by various characters. This section continues with a discussion of the relationship between science and nature and its implications for environmental philosophy and science fiction before ending with reflections on how terraforming narratives combine myth, science, politics, social inquiry and aesthetics to explore human relationships to their environments.

Landscaping Nature’s Otherness in Pre-1960s Terraforming and Proto-Gaian Stories

This chapter brings to bear environmental philosopher Keekok Lee’s three fundamental environmental theses (the Asymmetry, Autonomy and No-Teleology Theses) to consider how science fiction constructs human relationships to cosmological nature. It considers how pre-1950s science fiction engages with concepts now central to environmental philosophy before moving on to examine the sublime in proto-Gaian living world narratives. Underlying this discussion is the concept of nature’s otherness, a relationship between non-human nature and the human. It builds on the insight that the initial growth of ecologism in the 1880s involved two strands, a mechanistic view of nature based on energy economics and a monism that involved a vitalist view of nature as essentially irreducible to mechanistic conceptions. These concepts form the core of the readings to follow.

Conclusion

Paying special attention to the role of landscaping, Bakhtinian dialogism, the science fictional megatext, pastoral and utopian discourse, ecology and environmentalism, the conclusion to Terraforming considers how the terraforming motif provides a point of convergence for all these dynamics and discourses. The main part of this section reflects on the terraforming narratives that have been published during and after the mid-1990s and suggests many fruitful avenues for further research into terraforming. Ultimately, this section argues that terraforming demonstrates the tendency for science fiction to operate as a literature of landscaping, an environmental literature that examines the importance of the world in the light of contemporary technological innovation and intervention into nature.