Stages of Transmutation

Science Fiction, Biology, and Environmental Posthumanism

Tom Idema

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351846998
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria en la ciencia ficción

Stages of Transmutation: Science Fiction, Biology, and Environmental Posthumanism develops the theoretical perspective of environmental posthumanism through analyses of acclaimed science fiction novels by Greg Bear, Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Jeff VanderMeer, in which the human species suddenly transforms in response to new or changing environments. Narrating dramatic ecological events of human-to-nonhuman encounter, invasion, and transmutation, these novels allow the reader to understand the planet as an unstable stage for evolution and the human body as a home for bacteria and viruses. Idema argues that by drawing tension from biological theories of interaction and emergence (e.g. symbiogenesis, epigenetics), these works unsettle conventional relations among characters, technologies, story-worlds, and emplotment, refiguring the psychosocial work of the novel as always already biophysical. Problematizing a desire to compartmentalize and control life as the property of human subjects, these novels imagine life as an environmentally mediated, staged event that enlists human and nonhuman actors. Idema demonstrates how literary narratives of transmutation render biological lessons of environmental instability and ecological interdependence both meaningful and urgent—a vital task in a time of mass extinction, hyperpollution, and climate change. This volume is an important intervention for scholars of the environmental humanities, posthumanism, literature and science, and science and technology studies.

1 Introduction

Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy

In Kim Stanley Robinson’s acclaimed Mars trilogy, a group of one hundred scientists is sent on a mission to Mars to explore the planet and build the first human settlements. Well before the scientists even reach Mars, they concoct a variety of plans that envision a much more intense and long-term presence on Mars than initially intended. Physicist Sax Russell, one of the key characters, unfolds a plan to modify the planet’s atmosphere in order to make it breathable by introducing genetically engineered, oxygen-excreting microorganisms. Covering a period from the 2020s to the 2210s and encompassing over 2,300 pages, the trilogy takes the reader through a metamorphosis of Mars from its familiar rocky surface (Red Mars) to a planet covered by plants, mosses, trees, and even animals (Green Mars) and finally to a planet with vast oceans, not unlike the Earth (Blue Mars). Scientists execute mass-scale projects―for example, excavating huge areas of land to prepare an intricate system of canals, lakes, and seas, and bringing into orbit around Mars a “soletta,” a gigantic sail made of nanomaterials that reflects sunlight, to heat up the atmosphere. These projects are paralleled by other forms of engineering targeted at human bodies (e.g. life extension through gene-repair treatment) and ways of living (e.g. architecture, economics). Gradually, however, this colonial-scientific narrative morphs into something less familiar. Whereas the initial designs are based on experiences from Earth, the longer the scientists live on Mars, the more they become aware of a unique “spirit of place” that needs to be understood and cherished. What began as a more or less controlled process of terraformation (creating Earth-like environments on other planets) gradually transforms into areoformation (Ares being the Greek name for Mars) in which the planet and humans themselves transform in unforeseen ways. Under the spiritual leadership of the biologist Hiroko Ai, a group of renegade scientists work on an emergent, intuitive science of “areology” attuned to the unique circumstances on Mars. Epitomized by an unidentified narrator’s claim that “terrain is a powerful genetic engineer” (Green 13), areology is a science of interaction and transformation, tempering the hubris of terraformation and human enhancement.

The Mars trilogy won a number of prestigious science fiction awards, including the Nebula Award and the British Science Fiction Award for Red Mars, and Hugo and Locus Awards for both Green Mars and Blue Mars, and is one of the most celebrated pieces of science fiction writing. Compared to Golden Age Mars novels, such as Robert Heinlein’s Red Planet (1949), Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950), and Arthur C. Clarke’s The Sands of Mars (1950), Robinson’s work is much more advanced in terms of scientific and social complexity. The trilogy is both epic and encyclopedic, boasting a dazzling array of characters, perspectives, plotlines, landscapes, intertextual references, and ideas. Its tapestry of storylines is interlaced with vignettes in which mostly unidentified narrators offer highly localized, and at times esoteric, interpretations of the situation on Mars from scientific, mythological, spiritual, and historical perspectives. The tenor of the novels is one of unabashed optimism, an unwavering faith in human and scientific creativity in the face of the forces of nature as well as the pitfalls of stupidity and greed. Most scholars have analyzed the Mars trilogy as a social experiment that eschews the inertia of a ready-made, perfected society in classical literary utopias like Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. It is written in a spirit of problematization rather than solution: Kenneth Knoespel calls the trilogy a “utopian workbook” (111), and Fredric Jameson regards it as a superb example of a “polyphonic”¹ work, which “includes the struggle between a whole range of utopian alternatives, about which it deliberately fails to conclude” (Archaeologies 410). Daniel Cho has argued that each installment of the trilogy works through a set of contentious problems (how to design the first settlements, how to adapt the human body to the new world) toward a revolutionary event, “each time taking on a different, more alien, form” (66), with the final revolution being completely nonviolent and so slow that it is even imperceptible. Adding a psychological dimension, William Dynes praises Robinson’s adoption of narrative techniques to convey “the contingency of each character’s particular perspective on Mars and what is happening there” (154). As Dynes notes, the characters’ different perspectives on the color of Mars (blue; purple; or a new, Martian variant?) during the final stages of the narrative illustrate the contingency and open-endedness of the experiment. The Mars trilogy is a kaleidoscopic future-history, documenting the emergence of a new society from an as-yet-unformed, chaotic multiplicity, a nonlinear process unfolding in three stages.

I would like to complement these socially and psychologically framed analyses in two ways. First, I would like to underscore the epistemological dimensions of the trilogy, which can be read as a provocation to science. Several scholars have indeed acknowledged that the characters’ voices in the trilogy are also, specifically, scientific voices but this dimension has mostly been analyzed through the social and psychological lens. Here, I am particularly interested in the conflict between, on the one hand, (post)genomic discourses ushered in by the desire to control life and, on the other hand, scientific theories that amplify the ultimately unfathomable mutual dynamics between organism and environment. Second, by neglecting the content of science-as-politics and focusing almost exclusively on the struggles between (cultural) groups, most scholarship papers over not only the scientific drama but also the more-than-human drama. As Robert Markley and Chris Pak have shown, rather than treating human societies and natural systems as separated, the trilogy narrates the intra-actions between a whole set of mutually overlapping spheres: the geosphere, the hydrosphere, the atmosphere, the biosphere, the econosphere, and so on. I will argue that this approach puts the alleged humanity of narrators, focalizers, and readers into question while simultaneously putting a spin on Shakespeare’s phrase “all the world’s a stage,” which takes on its full nonmodern meaning as human fate is imagined as unfolding in dramatic interaction with the nonhuman world.

From an environmental-posthumanist perspective, the Mars trilogy narrates the introduction of humans into a foreign environment to see how they adapt to it as well as how the environment adapts them. The trilogy thus turns on its head the familiar ecological notion of “introduction,” in which introduced species are always nonhuman, and the actor doing the introduction is always human. In order to develop this reading, I will analyze the Mars trilogy alongside evolutionary psychologist Susan Oyama’s work on “constructive interactionism” in living systems. Critiquing the trenchant assumption in molecular biology that the “essence” of life inheres in a particular substance (DNA) or coded message (genetic instructions), Oyama’s concept points to an emergent, multi-scale network of resources for the development of organisms, populations, and ecosystems. For her, genes are one (important) resource in the network rather than its origin or center. As Manuela Rossini has demonstrated, Oyama’s constructive interactionism is also relevant for the Humanities, showing how bodies are constructed not just socially and discursively but also biologically, without falling into biological determinism (“Coming Together”).² In a similar vein, I want to demonstrate that Oyama’s concept helps to elucidate the interconnected processes of planetary and human transmutation occurring in the Mars trilogy in environmental-posthumanist terms, thus supplementing the aforementioned analyses of social and cultural polyphony.

After discussing the central projects of terraformation and human enhancement in the trilogy as driving technological novi, I will introduce Oyama’s constructive interactionism as an adequate, holistic model for understanding the narration of entangled processes of human and planetary transmutation in the trilogy. The relevance of Oyama’s theory for literary studies, I argue, issues from its narrative propensities as it figures life itself as the intricately staged, unpredictable development of form. It suggests that the key novum of the trilogy is not technology or a new society but rather the unpredictable transmutations of an emerging biosphere that includes the human beings who study and modify it.

Technological Posthumanism

Reading the first installment of the trilogy, the theme of technology looms large, and most of the plot action is, in fact, driven by the technological novi of terraformation and human enhancement. In this sense, Robinson can be placed among writers of so-called “hard science fiction,” who take seriously the technoscientific originality and plausibility of their work. Technologies in such novels are described meticulously, often from inception to completion and actual use. They are focalized from multiple expert and lay perspectives, drawing from scientific and mythological repertoires to communicate both understanding and bewilderment. Whereas there are certainly characters in the novels who object to technological “fixes,” the thrust of the narrative is such that these fixes seem inevitable. In some parts of the Mars trilogy, this air of technological determinism is suspended by the narrator’s amplification of historical and political contingencies. For example, when, in Red Mars, the scientists touch ground, they find “an entire town, disassembled and lying in pieces” (106), and the members of the First Hundred have divergent, politically and culturally motivated ideas about how to design their new home. Most often, however, technologies are presented as self-evident—characters are either for them or against them. A case in point is the thirteen-year megaproject of building a nanoengineered “space elevator” between the surface of Mars and a small asteroid called Clarke, designed to drastically lower the costs of transport between the Earth and Mars. The project is described as if it is executed with relative ease. This image of technological smoothness is enhanced by the swiftness by which the space elevator is accepted as normal, as evinced by the narrator’s description of the onlookers’ responses when the first elevator car docks on the Martian platform:

Now the object looked much less strange than it had when hanging out of the sky; now it was nothing more than the reduction ad absurdum of Martian architecture, a very slender, very tall black spire. A beanstalk. Peculiar, but not so unsettling. The crowd burst into a thousand conversations, and scattered. (437)

The reference to the fairy tale of Jack and the Beanstalk merges the new into the known, the strange into the normal.

One might argue that through the normalization of technologies, the Mars trilogy sculpts an unabashedly positive image of science, “revitalizing,” in the words of Carol Franko, “the myth of science and scientists as hero” (545). Yet importantly, Robinson’s celebration of science and technology is not a naïve stance. As demonstrated above, scientists only become true heroes in Robinson’s work when they deliberately plunge into the messy world of politics. In other words, for Robinson, political agency is integral to science. As he argues in two recent interviews, the scientific method is “actually a way of praxis” (Robinson, “Kim Stanley Robinson” 89), making it “the equivalent of the most powerful leftist politics we have ever had” (Canavan, Sklarr and Vu 204). Robinson is keen to avoid reproducing a purely instrumentalist view of technoscience as a driver of “human progress” which is then “corrupted” by politics. In an interview with the journal Science Fiction Studies, he laments the production of a “consensus future” in science fiction, a usually bleak and generally indifferent future based on present conditions, as portrayed in “cyberpunk, or American-Imperial Heinleinism, or the ‘future-war’ subgenres” (Robinson et al. 186). In spite of their sophisticated accounts of human-technology interfaces, cyberpunk novels such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1983) and Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix (1985) can be seen as postmodern, bleak versions of Heinlein’s imperialist science fiction, obsessed with (male) aggression, fetishizing cybertechnology, and neglecting ecological processes.³

Robinson’s work, I argue, is posited exactly at the interface of technological and environmental posthumanism. From the get-go, it is clear that the mission to Mars is not innocent―it is a politically controversial experiment with new modes of living in a strange environment. Scientists and engineers play key roles in the continuous battle between states and “transnats” (corporations) over the mineral resources and carrying capacity of Mars at a time when societies on Earth are jeopardized by overpopulation and ecological disasters. Against this power play, various resister groups on Mars―mainly members of the First Hundred and their children―attempt to build a Martian society from the bottom up. Geologist Ann Clayborn is the most vocal representative of a “Red” group that is skeptical of any form of terraformation:

We’ll all go on and make the place safe. Roads, cities. New sky, new soil. Until it’s all some kind of Siberia or North-West Territories, and Mars will be gone and we’ll be here, and we’ll wonder why we feel so empty. Why when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces. (Red 158)

For Ann, terraformation means destroying the native landscape and overcoding it with human ideas and values. The project of terraformation is stunted on various occasions by resisting groups like the Reds, who try to liberate Mars from the straitjacket of terrestrial interests.

This critical perspective on technoscience is only slowly and subtly brought into focus. In the first part of the trilogy, the scientific agenda is heavily informed by the ideas of physicist Sax Russell, who is less interested in understanding Mars than in transforming it. Working off the premise that “the planet is the lab” (263), his team disseminates genetically engineered microorganisms, which excrete oxygen, gradually modifying the atmosphere so that more and more terrestrial life-forms are able to survive there. By the end of the twenty-first century, insects and animals, such as bees and moles, are introduced, reshaping the soil and creating ecoscapes resembling terrestrial tundras and savannas. This sense of total control is expressed in the following passage—undoubtedly inspired by the Human Genome Project which was taking place when Robinson wrote the trilogy—in which an unidentified narrator describes how new organisms are genetically engineered:

The array of restriction enzymes for cutting, and ligase enzymes for pasting, was big and versatile; the ability to line out long DNA strings precisely was there; the accumulated knowledge of genomes was immense, and growing exponentially; and used all together, this new biotechnology was allowing all kinds of trait mobilization, promotion, replication, triggered suicide (to stop excess success), and so forth. It was possible to find the DNA sequences from an organism that carried the desired characteristic, and then synthesize these DNA messages and cut and paste them into plasmid rings; after that cells were washed and suspended in a glycerol with the new plasmids, and the glycerol was suspended between two electrodes and given a short sharp shock of about 2,000 volts, and the plasmids in the glycerol shot into the cells, and voilà! There, zapped to life like Frankenstein’s monster, was a new organism. With new abilities. (205)

The reference to Frankenstein is suggestive because here, too, the organism is imagined as a prototype, an object assembled out of its constituent pieces. This formula for creating life resembles the current work of biologist Craig Venter, whose artificial life project arises from the assumption that life is a set of encoded traits made by “DNA software” (Venter “What is Life”). Once the operations of DNA software are understood, it is suggested, nature can be made anew. Venter anticipates that in the near future, scientists will be able to use these techniques for “engineering our sick atmosphere” (A Life 348) and for sending genetic information large distances over electromagnetic waves in order to “print” organisms elsewhere—even on Mars (Life 178).

While the planet is being modified, Ursula Kohl and Vlad Taneev’s biomedical team creates new human enhancement solutions to withstand low gravitation, extreme cold, and increased exposure to ultraviolet radiation levels. Life under the harsh Martian conditions does not come easy: apart from physical hardship, the scientists are pestered by homesickness, estrangement, memory loss, permanent déjà vu, and depression. As biologist Nadia Chern...