Free Green Planets by Gerry Canavan Page A

remarkable Quiet Earth fantasy, an inventor’s novel rocket fuel causes a chain reaction during the test flight that kills all life on Earth. Now the last man, the inventor commits suicide in the ocean so that the bacteria in his body can jumpstart a new cycle of life.
    Lauren Beukes, Zoo City (2010). The inseparability of the human and the animal is staged in this inventive response to Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, which sees humanbeings receive a mystical animal “familiar” whenever they commit a sufficiently
grievous sin.
    James Blish, “Surface Tension” (1952). Microscopic humans, descended from a crashed colony ship from Earth, befriend paramecia and battle predators under the ocean of an aquatic alien world.
    T. C. Boyle, A Friend of the Earth (2000). Novel following a convicted ecoterrorist, split between before (1980s) and after (2020s) an ecological collapse.
    Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles (1950). Bradbury’s epic of Martian colonization includes within itself a strongly elegiac sense of what has been lost in the process. Few stories in the book (or anywhere else, for that matter) are as powerful as “There Will Come Soft Rains,” which depicts the automatic functioning and ultimate breakdown of a computerized house years after a nuclear war has killed off all the people.
    David Brin, Earth (1990). The novel—focused on an experiment with black holes that goes awry and threatens all life on the planet—depicts human civilization at an inflection point between growth and final catastrophe, as ecological disaster and energy crisis reach their shared climax. Also of interest is Brin’s long-running Uplift series (1980s–1990s), which concerns great apes and dolphins raised to sapience by human beings.
    Max Brooks, World War Z (2006). One of the more innovative entries in the zombie craze of the 2000s, Brooks’s novel depicts the catastrophic consequences of a zombie outbreak on both governments and ecosystems.
    John Brunner, The Sheep Look Up (1972). Formally modeled on John Dos Passos’s U.S.A. trilogy, this innovative but utterly devastating work excoriates the denialism with which U.S. capitalism encounters the consequences of its own poisonous methods of production. Stand on Zanzibar (1968), about overpopulation, is also excellent.
    Tobias S. Bucknell, Arctic Rising (2012). International intrigue amid rising sea levels and global warming.
    Louis McMaster Bujold, Barrayar (1991). Harsh environmental conditions and lingering radiation from a nuclear war have led to a social tradition of killing “mutie” babies born with birth defects.
    Kenneth Burke, “Towards Helhaven: Three Stages of a Vision” (1971). Burke’s scathing indictment of the logic of progress deploys science fictional tropes about pollution, sustainability, and lunar colonization: “When you find that, within forty years, a great and almost miraculously handsome lake has been transformed into a cesspool, don’t ask how such destruction might be undone. That would be to turn back—and we must fare ever forward. Hence, with your eyes fixed on the beacon of the future, rather ask yourselves how, if you but polluted the lake ten times as much, you might convert it into some new source of energy. Thus, conceivably, you might end up by using the rotted waters as a new fuel. Or, even better, they might be made to serve as raw material for some new kind of poison, usable either as a pesticide or to protect against unwholesome political ideals.”
    Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Sower (1994). In Butler’s near-future America nearly everything has gone wrong, from the disastrous neoliberal privatization of necessary governmental functions to global warming to widespread poverty. The protagonist, Lauren Olamina, puts her hope in that great science fictional dream, the colonizationof the stars, founding a religion based upon this supposed