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  • From: Russ Grayson <pacedge@magna.com.au>
  • To: Intl permaculture list <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: [permaculture] Permaculture science-fiction
  • Date: Thu, 26 Jun 2003 19:22:10 +1000

With regard to the current discussion about Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy and other works, I was reminded of a book I started to read some time back but lost track of. I don't recall who wrote it, when it was written or what it was entitled. It was about an environmental activist in a decaying USA - the character seemed to me to be loosely based on a Greenpeace direct action model.

Somewhere in the novel he or another activist returns home from a period in the field. And his home? Well, it was a community, the description of which made it sound very much like what we would today call an ecovillage - renewable energy and so on (though I think the publishing date would have preceded ecovillages). The image described is of the fortunate and affluent few in ecovillage-type settlements which were, in reality, walled communities, amid an ocean of the less-affluent living is their dirty, dangerous, decaying environments.

The thing with science-fiction writing is that it is free to open up alternative vistas so we can ask whether we want society to move in that direction. I have been told, for instance, that Star Trek (I'm not a Trekie so I don't really know) is the only programme within the +SF genre to paint a positive view of the future. That implies that all other productions are dystopian in nature. That would make sense though, because story themes about struggle against evil states/ corporations/ machines can then be more easily woven in. Blade Runner (based on the short story: "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?") is a movie about struggle in a dystopian context.

Maybe will will see a permaculture-SF novel one day.

...Russ Grayson





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