The attitude of our times is reflected in the attitude of our fiction. The attitude of our fiction is reflected in the attitude of our times. The fiction of our attitude is reflected in the times of our attitude. The reflection of our fiction is timed in the attitude of our attitude. You may if you wish substitute the word altitude for attitude anywhere in the above. As for the below, the only way to get it is to continue. So continue already.
Only in recent years have science fiction writers as a class become aware of the infinite interrelatedness of species upon our globe and the mess created by man's tinkering, man's shortsightedness, man's greed, man's existence. The Great Web Of Life is rapidly coming unglued. Or, as the deservedly obscure eighteenth-century poet Alexander Beasley makes Adam exclaim, contemplating his pregnant woman and what their descendants will do to the earth:
"Oh, what a tangled web we weave
When first we practice it with Eve!"
So now we can expect a rash of environment stories. Dare we hope to put the Johnny-come-latelys straight about a few elementary facts?
First we had better prove that the genre hitherto has, by and large, been noted for ignorance about these matters than for foresight, hindsight, or even sidesight. It's self-appointed historian Sam Minnskwitz takes the opposite position, predictably. He has given us permission to quote from a speech he delivered at the 1969 Central North-northeastern Regional Science Fiction Conference in Serbia, N.H. (the Sercon). In fact, he quoted it to us himself, just the other day on the telephone, exactly as he spoke it in Room 1221 of the Serbia Hilton, from 11:43 p.m. to 4:37 a.m., when at last his host insisted on getting some sleep.
"Science fiction actually created this word. In the June, 1927 issue of Flabbergasting Stories, beginning on page 33 with an illustration by Wroczelowski, breaking at page 51 to conclude on page 137 between an advertisement for Dr. Belleigh's Special Patent Truss on the left and the Shafter School of Correspondence on the right, was a novelette entitled 'The Horror From The Slush Fund' by Zeke de Bourbon-Parma, a pseudonym of Ugtrid Swenson. The giant elephant manufactured by the mad scientist very clearly shows the danger of man's tampering with nature, when it runs amok and pulls up all the cabbages for miles around and stuffs them. But as for the word, I refer you to page 58, third and fourth paragraphs:
"'Professor Grue leered as he pointed to the thing in the back yard. "The science whereby I brought this into being is so mysterious and advanced it has not even a name," he lipped thinly. "Tell me, young man, what do you think I should call my new, ah, ology?"
"'Jon Saxon did not recoil from the sight of the seething, putrescent, giggling mass. He was too bold for that, not to mention too muscle-bound. But disgust crossed his handsome features and he muttered, "Ech! Ology?"'"
Minskwitz went on to trace in some detail what he alleges to be the concept, beginning with certain cave paintings which Hugo Gernsback once mentioned in the Electrical Experimenter. But space forbids us to quote him further. So does our editor.
The point is, however, none of these early stories show any sophistication about the dynamics of a bio-system. Monsters simply rove around, trampling houses, slavering, and eating Los Angeles. Actually, if this happened, termites would become an endangered species, algae would become thick in the puddles of drool, and the monster would become violently ill. Pull one thread in the Web of Life, and elsewhere a bell rings and nature lights up and said, "Tilt."
A handful of more modern sf writers have used such facts to good advantage. For example, there is Hank Frerbert, who lately published the ninth novel in his famous series in which a time traveler from the desert world returns to the boondocks of Old England: Lorna Dune. Clem Mental's Gravity Impossible depicts a life cycle on a huge, cold planet in which the squonk breathes hydrogen and excretes methane which the zorch and the zilch successively polymerize to a plastic which is not biodegradable until the dwarfs come along and pulverize it with their little hammers, after which the toitles incorporate some of the material in their shells, which the iggles that prey on them use for nests, while the rest of the material goes off in fifteen different biochemical chains and the whole thing gets much too complicated to follow. And then we have Hari Seldon -- perhaps a pseudonym -- who was inspired by the moth-yucca symbiosis (the former lives off the latter but is vitally involved in its reproduction) to produce Yucca Sucker, the first pornographic ecology novel.
But the exceptions like these are few. Most authors continue to copy the same old fallacies from each other. To take a notorious case, they keep saying that biological processes reduce the entrophy in the organism. This is not true. What biological processes do reduce is the Gibbs free energy. Never mind now what that means. Read next month's column.
If the authors don't want to get this technical -- and after all, why should they? That's our shtick. Let them find their own and stop snooping around! -- they ought at least to do their homework here on Earth before they start trying to design other planets, a job which a realistic look around this phoey Solar System indicates could have been handled better by the Creator himself if competent advice had been available. Let them develop, and show, some appreciation of the subtleties and complexities of the Great Web.
To take only one case, we've all heard about deer and predators. Hunters kill off the animals which prey on deer, such as wolves, mountain lions, and other hunters. The deer then have no check on their numbers. They multiply till they overgraze the range and starve.
Ah, but this is merely the obvious part. Pay attention. Hungry deer kill trees by stripping the bark off them. This changes the character of the forest. Tougher, brushier growth moves in. Birds which live here say, "There goes the neighborhood" and move out. The insects that formerly controlled take over. Dying off, these bugs support a vast community of ants. Given time, they in turn attract other animals. And so at last the deer are replaced by pangolins.
The main thing for the sf writer to keep in mind is that ecology works like something by Rube Goldberg.
--Poul Anderson
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"No matter how much you dislike pickles, it is, after all, the only thing you can do with cucumbers."
--Ernie Lundquist
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Data entry by Judy Bemis
Hard copy provided by Geri Sullivan
Data entry by Judy Bemis
Updated September 13, 2002. If you have a comment about these web pages please send a note to the Fanac Webmaster. Thank you.