Ecofiction is getting an increasing amount of attention lately, perhaps because it’s the most relevant genre out there for life in the Anthropocene today. Everyone either has been or will be affected, to various degrees, by the environmental crises around us. Admittedly, the response from ecofiction writers to those crises tends towards the dystopian—or what some might call, under the circumstances, the realistic—and that trend is certainly emphasised in ECO24: The Year’s Best Speculative Ecofiction, edited by Marissa van Uden. This inaugural volume is hopefully the first of many, and its collected stories are complex and challenging.
They’re also, the vast majority of them, pretty grim. A number of these stories are set in environmental dystopias—as if there is any other kind. Is it possible for any dystopia to exist that doesn’t include ecological devastation of one form or another? There are certainly fictional dystopias that focus on the exploitation and degradation of one or more population groups, but these are nearly always linked to environmental disaster. In Eugen Bacon’s “The Water Runner,” for instance, a drought so severe that it dries up the ocean is said to be the result of “a curse that rose from Mother Africa’s lips in her bereavement for her lost sons and daughters.” This might be a metaphorical explanation, but there’s arguably more than a grain of truth in it: The pathological desire for profit that once supported slavery also supports unsustainable environmental practices, no matter the human or ecological costs.
Dystopias such as these are increasingly hard to read—but are they hard to read because the metaphors are so recognisable, or because we’re aware, as we read, of how increasingly remote it all feels? As E. M. Faulds writes in her story “Love, Scotland,” everyone is haunted by the global litany of disaster: “Stories of strangers dying, disasters that wiped out communities, trauma—helpless to change things but witness to it all. The internet connected them but divorced them, increased empathy but decreased agency until people drowned in it or switched off that part of themselves.” The narrator of Matthew Freeman’s story “Birdseed” agrees: “I won’t bore you with how it all came apart. We have had enough exhausted chronicles of the dissolution.”
There’s only so much empathy that can be felt before it does become exhausting, and we harden ourselves so easily. One of the best stories in this collection, for me, was “Bodies” by Cat McMahan, about cloned workers at a factory for cloned chickens. The images of human and chicken reflect each other until they almost meld, with both exploited terribly for gain—the chickens because they can be reared without care for any animal welfare standards, and the humans because they too can be harvested if their body parts benefit non-cloned humans—and yet my shock, while reading, was reserved primarily for the chickens, the birds engineered to exist without a voice box and with minimal appetite, so they “couldn’t wail or want.”
I don’t even like chickens that much. Well. Half the time I don’t like humans that much, either, but surely this is a grim reminder of how easy it is to turn off empathy, or to limit its expression. It’s not as if I haven’t read stories about the harvesting of cloned humans before. Possibly I was more shocked by those earlier narratives. Honestly, I just don’t remember. I don’t recall ever reading about suffering cloned chickens before, though, so maybe it’s just novelty in narrative that grabs my attention these days.
That should be a horrifying admission, a horrifying paragraph to write, but I no longer feel that either.
Broadly speaking, that sense of numbness, of inconsistent and dysfunctional response, is something I’ve focused a lot on in my own ecological fiction: the changing emotional response to living in a world of explicit environmental degradation. The idea that some of the many potential responses have a greater validity than others is, I admit, something I struggle with. The opening story of ECO24, “In the Field” by Shelly Jones, cuts to the quick in that respect. An artificial intelligence working for an elderly academic, isolated in a former agricultural landscape now rendered sterile and uninhabitable from fallout, considers the inability of their employer to come to terms with what has been lost: “I nod, unsure what to say; what will be of comfort when the soil is toxic, the air polluted, and the prospect of that changing soon is unlikely. Eventually the teams will clean up the fallout, eventually the soil will absorb the radiation, but the professor will not be here when the land heals.”
My reaction to this, I confess, is unsympathetic. Why should she be there? I’m not talking in terms of age, either, or of mental competence; the professor is clearly in the early stages of dementia. But the painful truth is that the fallout described in the story, the pollution and toxicity, didn’t happen by accident. It’s a result of choices, and the professor made hers. And yes, it’s often said—and it’s true—that corporations and governments bear more responsibility for pollution and other environmental disasters than individuals, but it’s also true that those corporations and governments are able to do what they do because of the world that individuals allow to exist. If we will keep voting in politicians who gut environmental protections, then what the hell can we reasonably expect?
At some point, the choice not to haul out the guillotines is on us all.
Fiction, of course, is spectacularly good at creating worlds where the guillotines stayed in their sheds and rusted. The world that the professor inhabited—that she still inhabits, in her memories—is gone. That the AI narrating the story at least considers what might comfort her is indicative of a certain amount of generosity on its part. Then again, that AI has lost very little: The remediation of the land that is occurring within the story is one performed by machines—who, unlike the professor, may well be around when that remediation is complete. The generosity, then, costs the narrator nothing.
As readers, can we say the same? How much sympathy are we expected to give? How much do we think that we, ourselves, deserve?
That’s the question, isn’t it. Increasingly, it might be the most salient question that ecofiction can possibly explore: How much do we deserve this? What comfort do we have a right to expect, and who is going to be there to give it to us?
A quick aside: I read slush for Reckoning, which focuses on environmental justice. You would not believe the number of stories we receive in which aliens, animals, divinities, superheroes, or other nonhuman entities turn up to fix our environmental messes and generally improve the world for our benefit. These stories are hard sells, because they refuse to engage with the notion of responsibility, both personal and collective.
No one is coming to save us. We have to do it ourselves … and if we choose not to, what then? It’s the AI in the (fallout) fields, cleaning up and trying, inexplicably, to comfort. It’s the alien field workers in F. E. Choe’s “Swarm X1048,” documenting the human destruction of species and ecosystem and a single beloved dog, not able to save any of them because their ethnological practices require observation only, and even if they didn’t: how is it possible to mount a rescue on a planetary scale when the planet’s own population can’t collectively be bothered? (Notably, all the Swarm’s inclination towards comfort is reserved for the dog. It’s not guilty of anything.)
If this seems a little hard, a little too black and white, then I’d agree. We know from the real world that some people, some populations, are more responsible, and bear more guilt, than others. Responsibility may be shared, but it’s certainly not shared evenly.
Neither are consequences. In Bacon’s “The Water Runner,” for example, money to escape the waterless dystopian setting is earned through the reproductive exploitation of women such as the protagonist Zawadi. In Osahon Ize-Iyamu’s story “We the People Excluding I,” a series of well-meaning human sacrifices offer themselves up in a futile attempt to try and stave off active predation of their communities by the powerful Fox Man. The environmental reclamation workers in Steph Kwiatkowski’s “Batter and Pearl” are stuck in poverty traps that such work is effectively designed to keep them in. Furthermore, “The Plasticity of Being” by Renan Bernardo explores a world where an enzyme-bacteria system is developed so that people can eat plastic. By “people,” of course, I mean the poor, who now find it much easier to feed themselves by sifting through piles of garbage. This is implicitly accepted as a good thing by the wealthier and less vulnerable classes: “Feeding people would become a decentralized process without lots of points of failure. Costs would plummet. It would all become excruciatingly cheaper than producing any kind of food,” although readers will all realise that food will still be eaten, of course, by the people who have never been in any danger of scavenging from trash.
That so many of the ECO24 stories share this clarity of unequal responsibility and consequence is, in many ways, an indication of what is to come. These stories are not outliers, nor are they telling us anything new: They are solidly representative of the current state of knowledge in environmental justice. We know now that some populations are more responsible than others. We know now that some populations will suffer more than others.
The question, then, is—as individuals, and as communities—what are we to do about it? What ethical responses are open to us?
There are, admittedly, a number of stories in ECO24 that grapple with the idea of responsibility and atonement and the possibility (or impossibility) of comfort. “A Seder in Siberia” by Louis Evans, for example, shows a family discovering that their exile to a lifetime of climate remediation work wasn’t due to their refugee status, but to their father’s crimes against humanity (he refused to give water to people who died of thirst in a holding cell). This piece of family history is only discovered after the father, himself mentally compromised due to illness, sends his oldest son to try and negotiate a return. “I want to go home,” he says, as if his actions hadn’t materially contributed to the loss of that home, both for himself and for others. The father’s silence, over the years—neither his children nor his grandchildren are aware of his past actions—and his refusal to actively engage with those actions, is not exactly indicative of remorse. One might argue that remorse doesn’t have to be publicly expressed in order to exist, but if you let dozens of people die of thirst (and the story implies that those unfortunates were refugees themselves), then there’s that question of comfort again, and of sympathy.
And, inevitably, of forgiveness.
I have trouble with forgiveness.
*
There’s a story in here I almost didn’t mention. “Parasite’s Grief” by Katharine Tyndall is about two nonhuman species, one of which acts as a parasite on the other. Without that parasitism, the Hyella would “live larger, longer, more peacefully”—and yet the Hyella have agency and intelligence, and many of them choose the shorter, smaller, less peaceful life that comes with parasitism. There’s a long, unpleasant history of linking exploited human minorities with exploited nonhuman bodies, and I side-eye the comparison, especially when that element of voluntary choice is added to the mix. No one volunteers for slavery, for instance. Yet there’s an element of genius here in that “Parasite’s Grief” is placed, in this anthology, directly before Kelsea Yu’s “Skittering Within,” in which an infant vaccinated with the blood of suffering horseshoe crabs—they’re only animals, might as well bleed them as well as boil them alive—goes through a bodily change of her own as she ages, turning part-horseshoe crab as well. Hai’s infant exposure is not voluntary on her part, of course, but her choices as she grows, as she turns toward the nonhuman instead of the human, speak to a chosen loyalty to the exploited crabs, to their plundered bodies.
“Skittering Within” has one of the happier endings in the book, as Hai’s turn to the sea is presented as an unalloyed positive. There’s an uncomfortable question here, though, of how much exploitation is internalised, how much it is chosen—particularly, as I said, when contrasted with “Parasite’s Grief.” The genuine loss that the Teloschi parasite feels at the death of their Hyella is referred to as a natural part of life … but they still parasitise them. It’s an inescapable part of the Teloschi life cycle, and necessity is excusal. But what is necessity, and how much of our own exploitation (of others, and of ourselves) do we excuse?
It’s a choice to bleed horseshoe crabs, to offer up your body as Zawadi does, to eat plastic. To keep the guillotine in the shed.
*
Refusing forgiveness for that choice is often cruel. People do the best they can to survive in the situations in which they find themselves, and all too frequently those circumstances are not of their making. The more exploited you are, the fewer choices you have, the easier it is to sink into identification with the nonhuman—because there’s wonder in that, there is, and a focus on that wonder, that sense of communion, can drown out other options.
It’s an uncomfortable mix, complicity and forgiveness. When Hai is coming down the stairs, shrieking in pain because her mother is boiling a crab, for a moment I think she’s going to brain the woman for her indifference to the suffering of her meal and her child. Part of me wants her to. Part of me wants to do it myself. I read stories like this and I think, What’s stopping me? I like the ending to Yu’s story. I like the transformation, the escape. But escape isn’t freedom. Not for everyone, anyway. Not from everything. Increasingly, I wonder if it’s nothing more than the breath before the blade comes down.
Part of me wants that blade. Part of me wants other people to use it so I don’t have to. Part of me, clearly, is attracted to the possibility of dystopia, if only because some things will be easier to excuse.
Ecofiction does not have to be dystopian, but dystopian it mostly seems to be: a way for writers to work out the lingering, unsettling horror at the ecology around them. There’s no shortage of real-life environmental horror stories out there, and it doesn’t seem to be getting better. Dystopia sells, whether it’s on the bookshelves or on the news, but if science fiction has a history of broadcasting warnings as well as imagination, then there are stories here that offer, amidst the horror, comparatively brighter exemplars. The welcoming of refugees in Faulds’s "Love, Scotland" is one example of this, and it’s notable for being one of the few realistic examples. More frequently, successful resistance is essentially magical, as it is in Guillermo G. Mendoza’s “One with the Ground,” in which a girl with an amulet restores clear-felled forest every night.
The magical resistance stories are touching, they are. I’ve read a lot of ecofiction lately where resistance has magical overtones, as if we find it difficult to picture without the marvellous. The girl who becomes a crab, the girl who becomes forest ground. There’s beauty in the imagery. There’s hope in it, even. But it’s inspiration, not application.
I’m not knocking inspiration. We need that sense of possibility, just as we need the warning sirens of the genre. I do feel, however, that, in this anthology at least, the warning signs are the most prevalent. I certainly understand that—it’s art reflecting reality—but if this anthology is representative of the best of ecofiction, what does that tendency say about our ecological visions of the future? It says that they tend almost inevitably to the dystopian. And without the guillotines I’m no longer sure that’s enough.