John Charles Ryan
Adjunct Associate Professor, Southern Cross University, Australia
Abstract
This article undertakes a comparative phytocritical reading of Brian Aldiss’ Hothouse, recipient of the 1962 Hugo Award for Best Short Fiction, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Word For World Is Forest, winner of the 1973 Hugo Award for Best Novella and finalist for the National Book Award in 1976. Aldriss’ novel is a work of futuristic fiction featuring botanical protagonists such as omnivorous spider-like plants. In the narrative, humankind addresses the looming threat of self-extinction by pursuing refuge in the canopy of a colossal banyan tree. In contrast, Le Guin’s novella portrays the imperiled forests of the planet Athshe—on which the indigenous Athshean people depend for their livelihoods—as the source of a biospheric intelligence resisting the colonialist advance of a military logging operation. This article contends that works of speculative fiction such as Hothouse and The Word For World Is Forest narrativize the possibility of a plant-like future by enabling readers to suspend engrained mechanistic conceptions of botanical life. A vital step toward imagining equitable coexistence with plants is the reconfiguring of conventional notions of botanical beings as sessile, stationary, unfeeling, and insentient components of the human perceptual ambit. This radical transformation of values entails recognizing plants within their particular phytospheres of relation.
Keywords: botanical futures, Brian Aldiss, plant intelligence, phytosphere, speculative fiction, Ursula Le Guin
Introduction
In its analysis of thirteen-thousand plant species worldwide, the International Union for Conservation of Nature calculated a sixty-eight percent rate of critical endangerment. Other estimates, such as the report State of the World’s Plants and Fungi (Antonelli et al.) published by Kew Gardens, suggest that twenty to twenty-five percent of plants globally face extinction. Considering the deep entanglements between plants and humankind through food, drink, medicine, fiber, elemental exchange, cultural heritage, and spiritual sustenance, these statistics become especially harrowing for the future of life on Earth. How might humankind become more plant-like, thus actualizing a greater degree of synchronization with the particular intelligences of vegetality in our scientific, technological, cultural, social, and interpersonal endeavors? How might humanity include plants as percipient agents vital to future prospects for cohabiting the biosphere? How might speculative fiction engender the imaginative faculties and transgressive outlooks necessary for living consciously and cooperatively with the botanical world? Responding to these questions necessitates an awareness of the global imperilment of plant diversity alongside the recognition that botanical futures require commitments to halting plant loss and valuing the botanical heritage of the biosphere. Future laws might vigorously protect plants and grant them moral standing. A post-petroleum world might be powered by highly efficient and quiet renewable photovoltaic sources. A more plant-like future might also involve a metaphysical reorientation towards vegetal forms of existence that would fundamentally reshape society and culture.
Speculative fiction is a broad category of fiction encompassing science fiction, dystopian fiction, supernatural fiction, horror, fantasy, and other genres dealing with imaginative possibilities. In the context of plant studies, speculative fiction enables readers to develop the capacity to break down longstanding ontological demarcations between humans, flora, fauna, fungi, and other more-than-human entities. In support of this assertion, the following article develops a comparative phytocritical analysis of botanical futures in Brian Aldiss’ novel Hothouse (1962) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s novella The Word For World Is Forest (1972). In Aldiss’ narrative, for instance, human beings address the threat of self-extinction by taking refuge in the canopy of an enormous banyan tree. Percipient plants including giant spider-like traversers, superbirds, whistlethistles, bellyelms, wiltmilts, and others preside over the Earth, one side of which permanently faces the sun: “Obeying an inalienable law, things grew, growing riotous and strange in their impulse for growth […] It was no longer a place for mind. It was a place for growth, for vegetables. It was like a hothouse” (1). Following the techno-industrial collapse of society, monstrous plant creatures banished tribal groups to the unstable threshold zones between day and night. As the novel reveals, “they had finally triumphed, the vegetables had triumphed as much by weight of numbers as by inventiveness. Time and again, they succeeded simply by imitating some device used long since—perhaps on a smaller scale—in the animal kingdom” (92). Despite their depiction as intelligent in Hothouse, botanical creatures inhabit an uncertain ontological standing suggesting contemporary Western societies’ life-denying perspective on the botanical world. Aldiss’ plants are intentional and inventive yet imitative of animals, as well as percipient yet consumed by the same mindless over-proliferation that beleaguered human society before its collapse. In contrast, the forests of Le Guin’s novella become sites of indigenous sovereignty and resistance.
Plant Studies and Speculative Fiction: A Generative Convergence
The relationship between flora and the future is topical. The last decade has witnessed an acceleration in interdisciplinary plant studies particularly from cultural, literary, and philosophical perspectives. Meanwhile, scientific research into plant cognition has proffered a catalyst for re-evaluating plants and human relationships to them. In Through Vegetal Being, structured as a dialogue with French philosopher Luce Irigaray, Michael Marder contends that “by robbing plants of their time, and especially of their future, we deny a future to human and all other living beings” (144). For Marder, the convergence between human beings and vegetal temporality—defined as the specific modes of time according to which plants conduct their lives—could lead to a societal order with distinctly vegetal characteristics. A botanical future involves a reconfigured temporal orientation in conjunction with an experience of time located in place “that does not hasten to transport me to the past or to the future beyond the current horizon. The closest analogy to this experience, perhaps, is the feeling of one’s own body—feeling oneself feel” (Marder in Irigaray and Marder 151). A botanical future is one of somatic emplacement that resists the entrenched physical and metaphysical boundaries between past, present, and future. More specifically, Marder discerns a paradigm for human becoming within the non-appropriative photosynthetic mode of plant being: “That is still another vegetal lesson to be learned: how to energize oneself, following the plants, without annihilating the sources of our vitality” (Marder in Irigaray and Marder 185).
Comparably, in an essay published 1989, the ethnobotanist and psychonaut Terence McKenna proposed the heuristic “plan/plant/planet” in order to position the botanical kingdom as the creative matrix for the twenty-first century: “I propose that we should adopt the plant as the organizational model for life in the 21st century, just as the computer seems to be the dominant mental/social model of the late 20th Century, and the steam engine was the guiding image of the 19th Century” (1). McKenna concludes by elaborating some of the material and immaterial wisdom offered by vegetal life in relation to inwardness, connectedness, symbiosis, detoxification, whole system fine-tuning, recycling, photovoltaic power, a global atmosphere-based energy economy, nanotechnology, and the preservation of biodiversity as a repository of cultural heritage.
Critics have recently elaborated the contribution of speculative fiction, especially sci-fi, to environmental sustainability and plant studies. The ecological implications of sci-fi are debated particularly in the fields of ecocriticism and environmental design. Architectural historian Igea Troiani examines the potential of post-apocalyptic ecological science fiction novels and films to inspire sustainable architectural design. Troiani concludes that, rather than impractical, fanciful, or outlandish in its ambitions, sci-fi has serious potential to disclose ecological architecture pathways for future energy consumption through its appeal to the imagination. Comparably, Eric Otto and Andrew Wilkinson call attention to the emphasis within environmental discourse on technological rationality. In their research on time-travel narratives, Otto and Wilkinson observe that sci-fi allows the reader to critique the mechanistic worldview propounded by technological utopianism and encourages sociocultural transformation of the kind that the environmental sustainability movement strives for today. Sci-fi narratives promote dialogue about environmental crises not only in terms of technological approaches but also through the evaluation of human behaviors and societal norms. Ecocritic Patrick Murphy (89–118), furthermore, characterizes the genre as nature-oriented literature that facilitates critical thinking vital to linking present actions and decisions to future scenarios.
The interdisciplinary field of plant studies has begun to investigate the potential contribution of speculative fiction to understanding and reimagining human relations with vegetal life including pressing issues of ethics, conservation, species decline, and botanical futures. In the introduction to the edited collection Plants in Science Fiction: Speculative Vegetation, for example, literary scholar Katherine Bishop observes that plants are familiar protagonists in science fiction novels, films, television series, video games, and graphic fictions (1). Pervasive mediations of vegetal life in popular culture, particularly in sci-fi, signify an unsettling recognition of plants’ capabilities lying at the limits of human comprehension. Resulting in defamiliarization or cognitive disaffection, sci-fi enables audiences to confront that which is alien, strange, and other-than-human (Bishop 3). The representation of vegetal life in sci-fi has the potential to reconfigure human attitudes toward culture, politics, economics, and ethics, provoking “new visions of utopian and dystopian futures” (Bishop 5). The critical work of Bishop and others thus sheds new light on the agencies of plants in sci-fi and other genres within speculative fiction.
Locating Speculative Fiction in the Phytosphere
Many works of speculative fiction intersect, directly or indirectly, with scientific research into the intelligent capacities of plants. Indeed, one of the principal challenges negotiated by plant-oriented speculative fiction is the phenomenon of plant blindness. For James Wandersee and Elisabeth Schussler, originators of the term, plant blindness foregrounds “the perceptual and visual-cognition bases of why plants are often overlooked and neglected” (82). Wandersee and Schussler posit the phenomenon as the inability to notice the flora of one’s surroundings compounded by the broader failure to value the aesthetic, cultural, and ecological significance of botanical life. This widespread bias propounds an erroneous view of plants as inferior to animals and hence undeserving of serious consideration. Developing the idea of plant kinship blindness, moreover, François Bouteau and colleagues contend that, from the perspective of evolutionary development, plants and animals belong to sister groups. Although flora and fauna share a common phylogenetic history beginning 3.9 billion years ago, the modern refusal to recognize genetic kinship between animals and plants persists due to the ideological categorization of the latter as inferior on the chain of being. Nonetheless, homologies between plants and animals—for example, the occurrence of cellular signaling and innate immunity in both—have the potential to inspire feelings of identification, attachment, and empathy with respect to our chlorophyllic kin.
Integral to developing a critical approach to plants in speculative fiction, then, is the phytosphere and its imaginative representation. Ecologists approach the idea of the phytosphere in various ways. For Josef Svoboda (107), the phytosphere represents the planet’s vegetation as a whole in relation to the lithosphere (rocks), zoosphere (animals), homosphere (humans), and other ecological spheres. Svoboda stresses how the emergence of land plants significantly altered the Earth’s climate. Between 3.2 and 3.5 billion years ago, the advent of photosynthesis enabled plants to populate oceans and continents. To maximize nutrient production from light, terrestrial flora developed leaves, stems, branches, trunks, and other conspicuous anatomies. Approximately 400–500 million years ago, non-vascular land plants comparable to mosses significantly depleted atmospheric carbon dioxide, acquiring carbon and expelling oxygen. Before terrestrial flora appeared, high levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere maintained a stable climate. Since then, however, climatic fluctuations between warmer and colder periods have fostered the evolution of complex life forms including terrestrial animals. The zoosphere and homosphere, therefore, have developed within the contours of the phytosphere: “In this unique function of a food base and keeper of the oxidizing atmosphere rests the ultimate value of the Phytosphere in the hierarchy of identifiable physical realities” (Svoboda 111, italics and capitalization original). Whereas Svoboda adopts an evolutionary stance on the phytosphere, Walter Larcher (10) conceptualizes the term broadly as a plant’s immediate surroundings in which ecological transactions influence floristic life cycles. For other ecologists, the phytosphere more specifically comprises the interior and exterior of a plant, forming an integrated microecosystem that includes aboveground and subterranean structures (Yang).
The concept of the phytosphere illuminates the complex interactions between plants and other life forms that are often dramatized in works of speculative fiction. More specifically, the phytosphere is a conducive habitat for symbiotic microorganisms facilitating soil nutrient uptake and fortifying resistance to pathogens (Saito et al.). Rather than an inert source of nutrients, the phytosphere is “an ecosystem teeming with diverse flora and fauna including different groups of microbes that are useful as well as harmful for plants” (Pande et al. 1). Interfaces between mineral and organic components of the soil concentrate decaying organic matter from the bodies of worms and other creatures (van Elsas et al). In addition to maintaining microbial diversity, the phytosphere mediates genetic transfer and signal transmission. Phytospheric microorganisms have coevolved with communication mechanisms between plants and non-plants via cell-to-cell synapses and compounds similar to neurotransmitters (Simard, “Mycorrhizal Networks” 194). Indeed, plants orchestrate an ensemble of secondary metabolites functioning as signals, carriers, and messengers (Witzany). For instance, in the root zone or rhizosphere, an estimated 100,000 such compounds constitute the “molecular vocabulary” of vegetal communication (Witzany 29). As Svoboda further observes, an ecosystem is intrinsically “a cosmos of individuals, populations and communities that interact on many planes, exchange an immense variety of compounds and communicate through innumerable languages” (106). Ensuring the vitality of the microecosystem, an “interkingdom” signaling network mediates interactions between plants, microbes, and other organisms (Khan 1). To bolster communicative exchanges, plants secrete exudates promoting the colonization of beneficial bacteria.
More precisely understood, the phytosphere is a structurally diverse system comprising the rhizosphere, phyllosphere, and endosphere. The rhizosphere is the soil habitat in proximity to the roots of the host plant whereas the phyllosphere is the microbial environment associated primarily with leaf surfaces. In contrast, the endosphere is the microbiome within plant tissues (Saito 94–95). Microbial ecologist Lorenz Hiltner devised the term rhizosphere to describe the fine layer of soil providing the substrate for roots’ communicative secretions (Hartmann et al. 7). Hiltner noted that the microbial composition of the root zone significantly affects plant nutrition by rendering carbon, nitrogen, phosphate, and sulfur available (van Elsas et al. 527). The “wooded web”—a popular contemporary term for the rhizosphere—catalyzes information exchange within populations of plants as well as between plants and animals, insects, fungi, people, and other creatures (Gross R182). In arboreal rhizospheres, subterranean fungal systems known as mycorrhizal networks facilitate forest memory. Symbiotic alliances with mycorrhizae provide trees the energy required for memory processes, thus activating “the diverse intelligence present among humans and forests” (Simard, “Mycorrhizal Networks” 197). In the Pacific Northwest, according to ecologist Suzanne Simard, memory processes located the rhizosphere result from the interaction of trees, fungi, fish, bears, and humans. Roots scavenge nutrients from decaying salmon bodies carried by bears from rivers to trees. Through the rhizosphere, ancient cedars, spruces, and firs incorporate salmon-derived nitrogen into their rings, producing long-term histories of fish runs and variable environmental conditions embedded in tree bodies and forest habitats. Mother trees nourish their symbionts with organic compounds, a process that simultaneously enhances the health of neighboring trees and bolsters the biodiversity of the ecosystem (Simard, Finding 275).
As demonstrated by the example of the rhizosphere, the phytosphere is a nexus of signs operating symphonically to facilitate communication, memory, and meaning-making. Within the contours of the semiosphere, the phytosphere emerges as the groundwork of speculative imagining. For Jesper Hoffmeyer, the semiosphere directs expression, movement, and sensation as well as electrical, chemical, and thermal signaling (52–68). Toward consilience between the biological and linguistic, Hoffmeyer contends that “the biosphere must be viewed in the light of the semiosphere rather than the other way around” (viii). For Hoffmeyer, the biosphere is first and foremost a semiotic system where organisms respond discerningly to ecological variables, engendering meaning relative to other life forms (Harries-Jones 194). In proposing the term semiosphere, Yuri Lotman extended Vladimir Vernadsky’s articulation of the biosphere to posit the concept as “the semiotic space necessary for the existence and functioning of languages” (Universe 123). Lotman’s formulation constitutes a “radical reconceptualization” of language that situates communication and culture at the center of ecological processes (Hartley et al. 11). As a dialogical space, the semiosphere nurtures difference, reciprocity, and mutuality (Lotman, “On the Semiosphere” 216). At the dynamic boundaries between elements in a semiosphere information is translated and meaning produced. The semiosphere reflects a high degree of heterogeneity “defined both by the diversity of elements and by their different functions” (Lotman, Universe 125). Not only a hotspot of microbial activity, the phytosphere as semiosphere is a matrix of memory transmission characterized by “diachronic depth” (Lotman, “On the Semiosphere” 219). Botanical systems can thus be viewed as assemblages of coordinated semiospheres in perpetual information exchange. Approached vis-à-vis the semiosphere, the phytosphere becomes a space engendering dialogue, diversity, reciprocity, translation, and memory between plants, people, and other creatures. Taking shape within phytospheric delineations, speculative fiction enlivens plants, liberating vegetal life from the backdrop of human consciousness.
Aldiss’ Hothouse as Phytospheric Speculation
In Hothouse, the tribespeople Gren, Poyly, Veggy, May, and others seek refuge in the canopy of a gargantuan immortal banyan tree blanketing the illuminated side of the Earth. On first impression, the banyan mothership evokes the Yggdrasil of the thirteenth-century Poetic Edda, the immense tree that bridges the nine worlds of Norse cosmology. A highly adaptive and intelligent botanical system, the banyan is “the longest lived organism ever to flourish on this little world” (Aldiss 31). Aldiss narrates the evolutionary means by which the banyan attained ecosystemic pre-eminence:
On this continent, the banyan, thriving in the heat and using its complex system of self-rooting branches, gradually established ascendancy over the other species. Under pressure, it evolved and adapted. Each banyan spread out farther and farther, sometimes doubling back on itself for safety. Always it grew higher and crept wider, protecting its parent stem as its rivals multiplied, dropping down trunk after trunk, throwing out branch after branch, until at last it learnt the trick of growing into its neighbour banyan, forming a thicket against which no other tree could strive. Their complexity became unrivalled, their immortality established. (Aldiss 31)
Aldiss’ reference to the banyan’s “complex system of self-rooting branches” and the ensuing description of the tree’s intentionality, behavior, and learning echo Charles and Francis Darwin’s theory of plant-root intelligence. In the concluding passages of their co-authored treatise The Power of Movement in Plants published originally in 1880, the Darwins invoke the similarities between plant and animal movements and postulate that the vegetal brain lies in the root tip, or radicle, the part of a plant embryo that becomes the primary root: “[…] it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the tip of the radicle […] acts like the brain of one of the lower animals; the brain being seated within the anterior end of the body, receiving impressions from the sense-organs, and directing the several movements” (419). The Darwins placed this contentious speculation with great intent at the end of their four-hundred-page study. The biologists were conscious that such assertions would garner negative responses from peers such as Julius von Sachs who remained staunchly invested in the zoological paradigm of intelligence. The Darwins figured the plant as an upside-down human form, with its brain in the soil and reproductive organs and waste disposal anatomies suspended in the air. The Darwins’ prescient speculations have significantly influenced the development of new understandings of plant capacities in the contemporary era. Scientific research, for example, indicates that plant cells and human neurons share more characteristics in common than scientists previously acknowledged. In this context, biologist Anthony Trewavas leverages the phrase “mindless mastery” to denote the endogenous intelligence of plants in their obvious absence of brains and neural architecture.
In Hothouse, the root-brain hypothesis surfaces in the description of burnurn plants, translucent seed casings who exploit fire as a method of self-defense in the perilous high strata of the banyan phytosphere: “Here in the Tips, relying on that sun for its strange method of defence, the burnurn ruled among stationary plants. Already its sensitive roots told it that intruders were near” (33). Lily-yo, the leader of the tribe, disarms the burnurn by casting a shadow on their fire-brewing urns. In response, the plants demonstrate affective states: “As if realizing that this ruined its method of defence, the plant drooped in the shade, a picture of vegetable dejection with its flowers and its urns hanging limply” (34). In this perpetually illuminated world, however, plant intelligence at times becomes muted by the monstrous capacity of vegetal life to proliferate. Despite exhibiting behavior, learning, emotions, sentience, and other qualities, many of Aldiss’ vegetal creatures are represented as automatons who voraciously accrete biomass. For instance, there is the example of the suckerbird: “being of vegetable origin, it had little intelligence and only a rudimentary nervous system. What it lacked in this respect, it made up for in bulk and longevity” (72). Whereas the plant creations of Hothouse lack the capacity to speak, the sapient morel is a charismatic and loquacious fungus who colonizes the male tribesman Gren’s brain, directing and occasionally manipulating him throughout the second half of the narrative. In this way, Aldiss encourages readers to consider modes of plant percipience that radically diverge from familiar human forms predicated on verbal expression.
Le Guin’s The Word For World Is Forest as Conscious Arboreal Resistance
Le Guin’s novella appeared in 1972, a decade after the publication of Hothouse and toward the end of the Second Indochina War. From 1955–75, the US-backed South Vietnamese government attempted to eliminate the communist National Liberation Front and People’s Army of Vietnam of North Vietnam. In addition to its overt concerns over American imperialist incursion into Southeast Asia, the novella also emerged during an era of burgeoning environmental consciousness in the West, represented by the inaugural Earth Day celebrations in 1971 and the United Nations Conference on the Environment in Stockholm in 1972, among other landmark events. In this turbulent historical-political context, Le Guin’s speculative narrative focuses on a military logging operation established by people from Earth, known as Terrans or “yumens,” on the fictional planet Athshe within the Hainish universe that recurs across her body of work. Athshe’s indigenous inhabitants are the peaceful, matriarchal Athsheans whose cultural reliance on native forests has been fractured violently by the environmentally voracious practices of colonists. Terrans refer to Athshe appropriatively as “New Tahiti” and to Athsheans pejoratively as “creechies,” colonial slang for “creatures.” The settlement’s chief anthropologist, Captain Raj Lyubov, cautions his superior, Commander Yung, that “if the forest perishes, its fauna may go with it. The Athshean word for world is also the word for forest. I submit, Commander Yung, that though the colony may not be in imminent danger, the planet is” (Le Guin 86, italics original). Terrans clearcut the dense, dark, and fecund forests of Athshe to facilitate colonial expansion while satisfying the voracious need for wood on their deforested home planet where timber has become a rare commodity, “more prized on Earth than gold” (Le Guin 16).
As the forest laborer and deer poacher Kees Van Sten declares to camp commander, Captain Davidson, in the opening chapter, “Earth needs wood, needs it bad. We find wood on New Tahiti. So—we’re loggers. See, where we differ is that with you Earth doesn’t come first, actually. With me it does” (Le Guin 13–14). Dystopian scenes of ecocide or, more precisely, the arborcide of clearcutting surround the camps as the “stumps of the Strip nearest camp were already white and punky; chemically treated, they would have fallen into fertile ash by the time the permanent colonists, the farmers, came to settle Smith Land. All the farmers would have to do was plant seeds and let ’em sprout” (Le Guin 16). The Terran colonists raze ecosystems adapted specifically to Athshe in order to produce “fertile ash” for spouting the imported seeds of imperial advance. The imbrications between ecological despoliation and cultural annihilation are palpable in the colonial imperative to transform the landscape by eradicating both native plants and indigenous people: “Cleaned up and cleaned out, the dark forests cut down for open fields of grain, the primeval murk and savagery and ignorance wiped out, it would be a paradise, a real Eden. A better world than worn-out Earth” (Le Guin 12). For the escapees from the devastated Earth, the forests of Athshe are nothing more than a menacing “dark huddle and jumble and tangle of trees, endless, meaningless […] Roots, boles, branches, twigs, leaves, leaves overhead and underfoot and in your face and in your eyes, endless leaves on endless trees” (Le Guin 15).
Toward the novella’s conclusion, however, the forest becomes a powerful locus of resistance to the Terran Colony as the Athsheans attack Davidson’s camp, killing all the workers and taking the captain hostage. The revolt is led by Selver of the Ash Tree of Eshreth, an Athshean who served as an assistant to the colony anthropologist Raj Lyubov. Addressing Gosse, a friend of Lyubov who has now passed away, Selver expels the settlers to “where the forest is dead, where you grow your seed-grasses. There must not be anymore cutting of trees” (Le Guin 140). The Athsheans banish Davidson to an island previously deforested by Terrans. Three years later, the Terran ships arrive to rescue survivors from Athshe. In the final chapter, Selver meets with “yumens” from the ship, presenting them with Lyubov’s anthropological research on Athshean language and culture. The meeting takes place at the edge of the forest under an ash tree:
Selver and his companions settled down in the shade of a big ash-tree that stood out away from the forest eaves. Its berries were only small green knots against the twigs as yet, its leaves were long and soft, labile, summer-green. The light beneath the great tree was soft, complex with shadows. (Le Guin 185)
As Selver negotiates with the ship’s commander, who informs the Athsheans that the League of Worlds has banned the future use of their planet as a colony, the “green-gold shadows of the ash leaves flickered over them” (Le Guin 189). The novella thus connects the percipience of botanical life to the spirit of the indigenous people of the forest. Le Guin’s work prefigures Simard’s idea of ecosystemic intelligence as coalescing out of the phytospheric interrelation between life forms. Selver’s resolve to resist imperial invasion arises from the percipience shared between trees and people through lines of affective kinship.
Conclusion: Toward Botanical Futures
The botanical futures of Hothouse and The Word for World Is Forest reflect the transformative qualities of vegetal life articulated by McKenna, Marder, Trewavas, and others including autopoiesis, inwardness, brainlessness, and liberation from strongly demarcated constructions of the past, present, and future. The prominence of the percipient morel in Hothouse problematizes the human tendency to assign zoocentric forms of intelligence to particular categories of life including plants. Yet the importance of the ash tree to the final chapter of The Word For World Is Forest signifies phytospheric intelligence and vegetal mediation of relations between beings. To embrace a botanical future is to resist plant blindness, learning to distinguish plants from the manifold biological forms that make life on Earth possible. At the end of Hothouse, an integrated posthumanist vision of the future emerges in which the entrenched distinctions between life disintegrate in the new era: “Were the tummy-bellies vegetable or human? Are the sharp-furs human or animal? And the creatures of the hothouse world, these traversers, the killer-willows in Nomansland, the stalkers that seed like plants and migrate like birds—how do they stand under the old classifications?” (Aldiss 306). Hothouse suggests that a botanical future will also be fungi-like and bacteria-like as well as mammal, bird, and human-like. Aldiss’ future is one in which nature in its wholeness, rather than in its particularized forms, expresses collective intelligence. This expansive vision of a botanical future intersects with Le Guin’s narrativization of forest sapience.
Embracing life as ecosystemic entails recognizing the vegetal wisdom that emerges from close attention to—and conscious participation in—botanical worlds. To receive the wisdom of plants requires an openness to vegetal being intimated in Hothouse and The Word For World Is Forest as two prominent later-twentieth-century examples of speculative botanical fiction. Yet, the dystopian vegetal future of Hothouse in particular is constrained by militaristic defensiveness against plant-animal hybrids rather than an acceptance of the dynamic ecosystemic interchanges actually occurring on Earth at every moment. Notwithstanding their dominance and sentience, the vegetal creatures of Hothouse are rendered mindless, though not in the Darwinian or Trewavasian sense of root-brain perception. In Hothouse, vegetal life ultimately remains unthinking, mechanistic, menacing, and consumed with proliferation whereas in Le Guin’s novella the forest transforms into an intelligent nexus of resistance to colonial aggression. Despite their differences, however, both works allow us to think through—and with—plant intelligence.
As ecocritics point out, the value of speculative fiction for studies of sustainability and plants lies in its capacity to provoke critical thinking and prompt the envisioning of possibilities for coexistence with the more-than-human. Hothouse and The Word For World Is Forest lead readers back to the futures embodied in extraordinary flora—as well as fauna, fungi, and micro-organismic life—with whom humankind is entangled on an everyday basis and who ensure the functioning of our bodies, as posthumanist scholars such as Donna Haraway emphasize. The vegetal beings of Hothouse and the sapient forests of The Word For World Is Forest underscore the fact that plants are already predominant and resistive, accounting for ninety-nine percent of the biosphere’s mass. Rather than banishing humankind to the margins, plant life provides everything that is required for thriving here. Accessing this complex and potent reality through speculative fiction can catalyze a more sustainable, ethical, and plant-like future.
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John Charles Ryan is an Adjunct Associate Professor at Southern Cross University, Australia, adjunct senior research fellow at the Nulungu Institute, Notre Dame University, Australia, and adjunct faculty member in Environmental Studies at Susquehanna University in the US. His recent publications include Global Perspectives on Nationalism (2022, Routledge, co-edited), Postcolonial Literature of Climate Change (2022, Brill, co-edited), Environment, Media and Popular Culture in Southeast Asia (2022, Springer, co-edited), Introduction to the Environmental Humanities (2021, Routledge, coauthored), and The Mind of Plants: Narratives of Vegetal Intelligence (2021, Synergetic, co-edited). His poetry collection, Seeing Trees: A Poetic Arboretum (2020, Pinyon, with G. Phillips), explores the idea of consciousness in plants. Email: john.c.ryan@scu.edu.au
[Volume 5, Number 1, 2023]
