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LITR 4368 Literature of the Future 
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Sample answers
for Essay 1:
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Audrey Lange
5/9/19
Ultra-Terrestrial or Extra-Terrestrial: Comparable Futures in Fiction
Earth’s future seems an almost intentional
question mark in a universe full of them. Terra nova seems to be out of reach
for us, which begs the question of what to do with the planet we call home.
Future-fiction has provided many different ideas about what our future looks
like—cataclysms, bountiful crops, and alien contacts abound. Two of these future
scenarios, however, have a peculiar draw to each other. Ecotopias represent what
the Earth could be without human beings, or with a negligible amount of human
interference. Alien contact is the inverse: it is not a recovery as an ecotopia
is, it is a discovery. Both futures present questions about what our place means
-- if it means anything at all.
The early stages of an ecotopia are marked by
progressive urbanity: veganism, sustainable power, repairing the ozone, the
like. The intention is to use technology to fix the planet, streamlining a
high-tech future with an ecologically respectful vision. This is what the
solarpunks argued in favor of: “Positive futures where plausible technologies
give us practical green solutions (...) large space sailboats driven by solar
radiation, production of biofuels via nanotechnology, the advent of
photosynthetic humans.” Repurposing modern society as a clean, green machine was
the intent: living with the planet, not on it. However, technology is often
directly in opposition to ecological progress: industrial waste, mining, even
solar panels have an environmental impact. Those materials have to be harvested
from somewhere, and the waste let out somewhere else. Early ecotopias seem to
focus heavily on modifying our technology to
stop harm, not necessarily to
fix the harm already done.
Late-stage ecotopias shed all predisposition
towards modern technologies, relying solely on survival skills. The harm has
been done and the Earth has forced humanity into a position of de-evolution; the
story, thus, becomes ultra-terrestrial. Many late-stage ecotopian stories mirror
early Indigenous stories: responsible consumption, farming, and tribe-like
communities abound. Ernest Callenbach’s story “Chocco” presents us with a
late-stage ecotopia where the remaining human population possesses a sharp
reverence for the Earth that still allows them to live upon it. “We are Sun
People -- we honor our star but we also fear it,” the narrator tells his
audience (190). This respect for nature is a key facet of ecotopias. The fear is
what, often, keeps people alive. The commandments this tribe lives by are tenets
of most classical ecotopian fiction: “restrain our numbers, limit our
consumption, remember that the spiritual is the measure and meaning of all
things” (197). This idea of restraining excess in all things is what makes it
markedly different than early-stage ecotopias: it is not about humans. It is
about preserving the planet we live upon during her recovery.
The planet we live upon, as of right now,
remains untouched by any lifeforms but ones native to Earth. However, future
fiction has begun to try and account for what might happen if extraterrestrials
did touch Earth or those who live upon it. William Gibson’s “Hinterlands” is a
terrifying account of what happens when human beings come to meet something they
cannot fathom. The original astronaut to reach these beings is heralded as a
hero, but the narrator knows she “tried to hide us from [alien contact], clawing
at her radio gear, bloodying her hands to destroy her ship's broadcast capacity,
praying Earth would lose her, let her die. (...) She was trying to keep us from
finding our way out there, where she'd been. She knew that if we found her, we'd
have to go. Even now, knowing what I know, I still want to go” (7.19, 8.6).
“Hinterlands” presents us with a uniquely human ultimatum: to know more, you
have to lose something. You have to lose
someone. We never see these extraterrestrials, but that, it seems, is not
the intention of the work. The work seems to highlight that in order to
understand even a fraction of extraterrestrial life, we must sacrifice, and we
must do it willingly.
Early stage-ecotopias share a lot of
similarities with stories of alien contact. Solarpunks try to draw what they can
from ultraterrestrial sources, extracting every last bit of information and
worth out of the planet. The administration in “Hinterlands” does the same with
the alien artifacts returned by the astronauts. They create whole fields of
study around it (similar to the studies that would need to be created in order
for solarpunks to achieve “photosynthetic humans”) and continue to sacrifice
resources in pursuit of that cause. These two paths diverge, however, when it
comes to the information gleaned. Ecotopias are centralized around the idea of
living with the planet, in one way or another. It is the pursuit of the
ultra-terrestrial. Alien contact stories have usually moved beyond Earth; they
have exhausted its resources and holding capacity and are reaching out into the
cosmos for something else. The intention is that extra-terrestrial materials,
technologies, or beings can and will carry us beyond what we know as our home,
and into the stars.
The pursuit of the future, in whatever form it
takes, will never cease so long as we are able to imagine a future at all.
Future narratives serve as both a reminder that we have future in front of us,
as well as a means of quantifying what that future may look like. Terrestrial
living by no means has to be bleak, and it seems that future may lie ahead of
us. Learning to control excess and understanding how to repair the planet are
key first steps into perhaps a differently imagined ecotopia. Alternatively, we
could encounter an alien species and move beyond our own planet, leaving
potentially centuries of knowledge behind in pursuit of a galactic future.
Regardless of how the story ends (or continues), fiction will continue to help
shape its potentialities.
Works Cited
Callenbach, Ernest. "Chocco."
Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias,
edited by Kim Stanley Robinson, Tom Doherty Associates Inc., 1994, pp. 189-213.
Gibson, William. "Hinterlands."
Burning Chrome, 1986.
Heer, Jeet. "The New Utopians."
The New Republic, 9 Nov. 2015.
